Part 1 – ERP Upgrades – A big undertaking..

Upgrades are usually performed to incorporate functionalities offered by a newer version and to mitigate risks of the current system. However, an ERP upgrade requires dedicated development time, resources and budget. They can take months, even years, to complete, and involves technical, functional and business user resources, to attain maximum benefits.

Key areas of focus that must be planned and budgeted for include;

• Ensuring smooth and uninterrupted data transfer
• Development of work processes and
• Report capabilities to provide necessary data for functionality and decision-making

Data Transfer

Data transfer between systems and/or ERP versions is also essential and can be complex .The volume and complexity of data increases with additional ERP modules, such as, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Resource Management, and Budgeting and Planning, and must be protected during the ERP upgrade process.

Work Processes & Reporting

Specific work functions must exist to ensure reporting continues and business needs are met. Reports which pull data from the ERP may require modification based on data organization (known as, its “schema”). Systems used to populate operational data stores, data warehouses, or data marts, (known as Extraction, Transformation, and Load, or ETL systems), may also have to be modified. The reports generated from these data stores should be altered to ensure a smooth transition. Depending on how reporting data stores are constructed,

If an organization has not upgraded its ERP and is skipping one or more intermediate releases, e.g. migrating from PeopleSoft 8.8 to 9.1 (skipping 8.9 and 9.0), the scale of the upgrade will increase to accommodate both ERP and reporting needs.

Ask These Questions before you Upgrade

ERP upgrade projects offer an excellent opportunity to reevaluate your BI strategies for your ERP system. To ensure maximum efficiency and value is brought to the project, important questions should be asked by the functional and IT teams:

• How do we increase my organization’s agility?
• How can we foster cross-functional collaboration?
• How do we push adoption of best practice KPI’s?
• How do we increase the organization’s resilience?
• How do we provide metrics that span functional and data silos?
• How can we ease the pain for my next upgrade?
• How do we decrease the load on the ERP system?
• How can we lower my ongoing maintenance costs?
• What reporting should be implemented from my ERP vs. my data warehouse?
• Do changes in the vendor’s technology mean we should revisit other parts of the architecture during this upgrade?

An upgrade project is an excellent opportunity to answer these questions and build an infrastructure that not only supports your ERP system but also becomes a foundation for an enterprise wide BI initiative.

Stay tuned, next we will dive into answers to these questions and why it is important to implement BI during your ERP upgrade. Subcribe to the BI Blog RSS feed to be notified when part two becomes available.