ERP Implementation is one of the most critical and difficult jobs and associated with greater risk of failure. If there is no proper co-ordination between the top management of the both companies (vendor side and the customer side), project manager, functional consultants, technical consultants and module consultants, the ERP implementation process would take so long to complete.
Normally, ERP implementation will take 6 months to 2 years depends on the company size and the complexity of the operations. Six months of Implementation is a long time but there is no other way to go because there is a lot work involved in the implementation process.
1. The process will start from the understanding the customer requirements and map the requirements. This it self will take some weeks to complete.
2. Once the functional consultant is done with the requirement gathering, he needs to work on the best solution for the customer.
3. Some customers would like to see the proof of the concept and it may take 15 days to one month.
4. If the proof of the concept is satisfactory, then the implementation starts. But before implementation, there are some more important tasks to be taken care. Those are creating the process document regarding the customer requirements, the solution proposed and how it is going to be implemented.
5. This document will be reviewed by the project heads, business owner from the customer side and gives the feedback. If anything to be changed in the document, the same thing will be done in this process. This process is called GAP analysis.
6. After the GAP analysis, the functional consultant will go ahead with the implementation process by coordinating with the ERP core team for both the sides.
7. If the customer operations are too complex, the some of the modules will be customized according to the requirements.
8. The most important task will be coordination between the teams. This is what takes the most of the time in the implementation process. Each and every part in the implementation will be interrelated. If one work does not completed, there is no chance of touching the other work which is interrelated with the former one.
9. The communication is very difficult between the vendor and the customer because of the technical terms used by the implementation side.
10. The functional consultant will take some more time to create the user guide before signing off the project.
11. The training will take at least one week to make users comfortable with the system.
We can not blame anybody here because the nature of the work is like that and you have to endure it. If you try to go fast, you will definitely ignore some important ingredients in the implementation process and that is not recommendable. With this type of hectic work and the complexity of the process, any medium sized implementation will take at least 6 months and some big size implementations will go on for 1-2 years.
