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When To Make Your First ERP Hire

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When To Make Your First ERP Hires

Let’s put forward a hypothetical…

3 years ago, you joined a company as a CFO.

Since then, you have excelled.

The company has grown at an unbelievable rate, with expansions into multiple new territories and markets.

The issue? Your team are still working manually.

The end of the month is literal chaos, scrambling to get everything organised has become impossible and everything is slowing down.

You need to streamline and automate… you need a properly implemented ERP system.

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There are triggers, to tell you that you’ve outgrown manual processes.

Reliance on spreadsheets or disconnected systems.

If you find your team constantly having to work between multiple spreadsheets and systems, it’s time to make a change. Your data should flow automatically end to end from point of sale, right the way through logistics and into the finance end of the business. With an ERP in place, the system is automated and reports can be generated without manually inputting new data.

Increased reporting errors

Are you finding that the more business you take on, the more mistakes creep in? This is more than likely an increase in human error due to sheer quantity of data input. Automating workflows via an ERP, will reduce the amount of human input in the chain. On top of that, for the human aspects that remain, you should see improvements in quality due to less burnout.

Struggling with compliance and auditing.

It’s a simple fact that the more data you have to input, the more complicated that chain becomes and keeping on top of it without a proper system will lead to things going missing, misunderstanding the data and in turn will create issues for your team. Having real automation in place and systems with real processes limits this. There is a clear and documented trail of money coming in and out of the business.

Increased stress and burnout in your team.

If you start to see people struggling with a process that once worked perfectly, with the same output and work rate… it’s time to upgrade your system. If you don’t, you will experience burnout in the team and in turn you will lose key members of the team.

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Why does the timing matter here?

Hiring too late.

if your team is already cracked and starting to break down you will struggle to get everything implemented in time to fix it. Implementing a new ERP is a huge task and can take 6 months to a year to complete. In fact according to BlueLink ERP’s study, only 58% of ERP implementations were completed on time.

Hiring too early is also an issue.

You need to be at a point where you need the system. If users don’t understand the need, or want to use the system, it can be very difficult to get them to use the ERP to its full potential. This can lead to huge wastes of resources and budget for the company.

The sweet spot…

There is a clear sweet spot here, and it comes when demand meets complexity. When the amount of data demands too much from your team, and it becomes too complex to fully organise manually. You need to pull the trigger on the implementation.

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Things to consider about the hiring plan:

Internal existing talent

Do any of your current team (project managers, It Managers, CIO etc.) have experience working on ERP systems? If so, you could save yourself a lot of money on external hires.

Customisation needs?

Will you need an out of the box solution, or do you need to customise the system to fit your company needs? If so, you will need to employ technically minded consultants and developers to make these changes.

Permanent or contract hires?

With everything considered and a timeline in place, are you going to need people in the team permanently? If you only need a technical consultant for a period of 3-6 months during implementation, you could save a lot of money but simply taking on an external freelancer!

What are the first hires you should look to make?

As its important to understand the needs of the business before any actual technical work can commence, the typical responsibilities for the first hires in your ERP team should be:

•Gathering Requirements

•System Selection

•Implementation Planning

•Stakeholder Expectation Management

These hires will generally be ERP Project Managers, Functional Consultant and a Business System Analyst.

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One final point here, and it’s probably the most important:Alignment

The entire company needs to be aligned on the goals, expectations and work that needs to take place.

If this is not the case, it will cause huge issues when you try to implement the software down the line.

IT, Finance & Leadership all need to be in agreement on the roadmap, customisation, use cases and processes for moving forwards.

Want more help on this? Drop us your name and email below and let’s talk about your plans!

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