The best time to upgrade your ERP system for success

Changing your back office systems, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), takes consideration. A reactive decision could leave your organisation with spiralling costs for implementation. But when is the right time to upgrade your solution? Is it really worth sharing the process of change years before your legacy system reaches end-of-life support?

In this blog our ERP expert, Ankita Narayan, explores the benefits of considering your move sooner rather than later, based on a longer-term outlook to ERP.

Making the move to cloud-based ERP solutions

Many of the branded legacy ERP systems that now dominate the market were created as far back as the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

As innovative as they were at the time, over the years, the reactive approach to working around clunky technology from decades ago has finally run its course. Instead, with a focus on staying competitive, secure, and efficient in a post-pandemic digital economy, the sooner organisations make the move to a modern cloud-based ERP solution, the better.

The right time to procure and implement a market-leading solution that caters to your industry’s specific needs is before your current system starts to limit smooth functioning of your day-to-day operations. Some key questions to ask yourselves in this regard are:

Are disparate teams able to collaborate across the organisation? Is it easy to access and transfer data between teams?
Is the current system as secure as it needs to be? Is sensitive data being protected from increasingly savvy cyber security threats?
Are processes simple and straightforward? Are processes being carried out without avoidable human error?

If the short answer to any of the above questions is no, then it’s already time to research leading ERP providers, and start conversations about the options available to you. Delaying will only limit the time you have to do the discovery work needed when embarking on such a large-scale change programme.

The discovery work is crucial to a successful implementation later down the line, since it will:

Ensure you have a clear vision, plan and goals established
Feed into developing a clear roadmap to support informed decisions
Support the transformational journey map to ready your people, data and organisation for change

Support from experts in ERP advisory and delivery

Socitm Advisory is 100% independent and vendor agnostic. It works with all of the leading technology brands to offer you the best advice in ERP and Best of Breed solutions based on your own organisation’s needs, and has to date worked with over 35 councils on their end-to-end ERP procurement and implementation journeys.

Our key advice to clients is to look at the implementation process as a holistic organisational change programme rather than simply a technology implementation.

As part of our ERP discovery work with a customer, we carry out in-depth analysis of its unique and complex structure to ensure that the organisation is strong enough to proceed with a large-scale implementation. This work takes time when it’s done well, which is why we always encourage our customers to start planning for a successful implementation today, even if the support for your legacy ERP system doesn’t expire for another couple of years.

Find out how we take our customers on their ERP journey through our ERP framework and read about the work we’ve done at Swansea Council, South Ayrshire Council, Norfolk Council, on their ERP implementations.