So you have a cloud ERP project looming in your near or distant future, hoping to transition off of a legacy platform onto a more modern Cloud ERP solution. It is a daunting prospect with lots of real risks and issues, not to mention costs.
One area you should not overlook is the opportunity to review your most important business processes prior to even submitting an RFP for new software and services. Leading cloud solutions are highly configurable and allow customers to nearly replicate their old processes in a new solution. This is usually a mistake, but how do you avoid that?
There are two extreme points of view. One is, don't bother with evaluating your old processes because you want to think fresh and replace them all with the new processes from the new software platform, presumably loaded with delivered "best practice" out of the box processes.
The other extreme is to document all of your existing processes end-to-end along with future state process narratives and maps. This is not necessary and likely is overkill.
We recommend you look at some current state business processes, not for the purpose or recreating them in the new system, but develop an internal end to end cross functional understanding of your most challenging existing process areas. You select them through team discussions using the following criteria: What are are highest dollar, highest risk, most complex and most broken processes?
Typically you will be able identify four to five that are the most difficult and because of that, they have the greatest room for improvement or transformation. So assuming you can take step one and identify the current processes to review, how should you go about it?
That will be the subject of a follow up posting: How to effectively review your existing processes ahead of a planned ERP project.