ERP Implementation Roles - Who Does What
In this video, we're going to talk about the roles and responsibilities involved in an E R P implementation.
The Project Sponsors & Project Managers
The first major role is the role of a project sponsor. This person is responsible for the whole thing and typically tends to be the chief financial officer, the finance director, or the HR director. If it's an HR specific implementation, the sponsor's role is to make sure that he or she is championing the project that he or she is approving the entire project, that he or she is taking it upon themselves to sell it to the council, to the city management, to the mayor, and taking overall responsibility for the project. That includes finding the budget for it, finding the timelines for it, finding the right resources for it, choosing the right vendor, and making sure that the implementation goes well. The sponsor's job is to own the process from the city or the county, or the government agency's perspective. The next major role is that of the project manager, the vendors team, the software team will have project managers on their side, but it's critical that you have a project management team on your side.
This could be 1:00 PM or if it's a large implementation, you could have a project manager and office that has multiple PMs, specifically looking after different modules. The project manager's role is to make sure that the timelines are being met, that the budget's being spent efficiently, that the vendor is doing what they are promised, and that the city's or the county's interests are being handled correctly. The project manager may have project management assistance on their team. They may have business process analysts. They may have business analysts on their team that are working with your team, the client's team as a single unit to make sure that this implementation goes well. If you're a large city, you may have an IT department that has a PMO that can handle this for you, but most of our clients tend to not have these resources and hire someone like us to handle implementation services.
The Vendor
The next is the vendor. The vendor's job is to provide you the services and the systems that you've just bought through this whole RFP process. The vendor is responsible for provisioning your servers, assuming you're going through the cloud, which most clients are today. The vendor's job is to make sure that the systems are set up right, that they're secure, that they've backed up, that they're not letting anyone that doesn't have access to your data, have access to your data. The vendor's job is to deliver on the promises that made to you, and it's critical, again, to hold the vendor responsible to not give them any slack for what they've promised to do. Next, we'll talk about functional leads. You'll have your sponsor, the project management team, but also people on your team that have day jobs. That is an AP clerk, that is the deputy director of finance that is in charge of your payroll solutions.
How They Work Together
All of those people have critical day-to-day functions that they do, but now you're going to give them a new job to be the functional lead. During the CRP implementation, a functional lead makes sure that a particular module or a function is set up most efficiently for your organization. Let's take for example, a purchasing agent or purchasing clerk. They will sit through sessions with the vendors team to configure the new RP system based on your processes. Going back to the process, redesign those documents, the requirements definition will come in handy as you make sure that the vendor is setting up the system in the most efficient manner. The functional leads will work with the vendor's implementation consultant that know the system in and out to make sure that the cities or the county's workflows are being most efficiently set up in the new system. So functional leads are critical because they have the knowledge of your past processes, of your current processes, and they've been involved in the redesign of the future processes.
It's important to note that the sponsor's job is to empower these functional leads to make decisions that are critical for the operation of the organization. When they come to critical junctures where they have to make a decision on a certain workflow, functional leads need to be empowered to make those decisions. Next group will talk about is it, how much should it be involved in an E R P implementation? As long as they have the resources that know the business process in and out, they can be involved as much as they need. Typically, it's involved in making sure that the VPN is set up, that the securities are set up. They're also involved in setting up user access levels. For example, if you wanna set up, once again, a purchasing process, who gets to approve whose workflow, who gets to approve, whose requisitions, it can help you set those up based on the information you give to them. Inherently, they're not equipped to make those decisions on their own, so it is critical when it comes to making sure the security's set up, making sure that your data's backed up. They're also critical when it comes to transferring data from one system to the other. If you need more information on the various roles involved in an implementation process for an E R P system, please reach out to Vero.