From an accounting ERP to a system landscape for all core processes.

Starting point

The existing ERP had been built around accounting. It worked for finance and hardly for anyone else. Processes outside accounting ran manually, by chasing people.

Behind this was a pattern: for years, very good and very expensive software had been bought for each individual function. What was missing were the connections in between.

Approach

• A baseline along the actual value streams.
• Alignment with strategic direction and business goals.
• A capability map: each capability assessed separately for whether it is relevant for this type of company and valuable for this strategy.
• From this, the investment logic: where to invest, where to buy standard, where to build custom.
• A market review in three fully costed scenarios: best of breed, highly integrated, cost-optimised.
• Implementation, migration and support from a single source.

Outcome

The company made the landscape decision itself, based on three comparable paths, each with documented alternatives and an investment logic at capability level. The decision was made four months after first contact, go-live followed five months later, with a deliberately tight project scope.

The new system covers financial accounting, CRM, project planning, expense management, purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash, in other words the core processes rather than accounting with add-ons. Migrating a large volume of data from a legacy system with poor data quality was planned as a risk from the start, and we deliberately extended hypercare and used it for optimisation.

Since then, processes have run across departments in one system instead of in isolation and by chasing people, and without the complete dependency on external service providers that used to accompany every change.