The 3 Steps to Successful Government ERP Modernization
Are you feeling overwhelmed with where to start with your E R P implementation or modernization process? In this video, I'm going to tell you where to begin. My name is Ajith Kar, and I'm a consultant that has helped many government agencies across the United States modernize their E R P systems or get them to a spot where their existing system does better work for them. The first thing you need to do is curb your enthusiasm. Don't just go buy something because there was a slick salesman. The demo was great. You met someone at a conference. It's easy to just say, I'm going to buy something I saw that was cool. And then what you'll end up with is a big mess on your hands when that thing you saw that was school at a conference didn't quite do the job. So holy horses don't buy a system just yet.
Business Process Failures
Look at your business processes, see where they're falling short. Is your current system causing you to have workarounds to workarounds, lots of paperwork, and just a sense of inefficiency and the fact that you don't have the right system in place. How have you been doing business for the last 20 plus years? Has your system been in place for a long time and 20 years ago, believe me, things were different, right? You used to do business in a certain way and then you brought the system in and you probably didn't do a lot of due diligence back then, so the system kind of took on its own life and you had to modify your practices to fit that solution. Couple that with people that have been in your organization doing a certain job for 20, 30 years and they do business a certain way, and if you ask them on their direct reports today, there isn't a real answer to why they do a process a certain way.
So we need to dig deep into all of these practices to see where you stand today. Before you do anything else with your e R P modernization, let's just take your financial processes. How do your employees currently do them? Generic practices like accounts payable, accounts receivable, sending invoices, receiving payments. How does all of that work today? Is there any opportunity for you to modernize, to automate, to do things in a way that is not cumbersome, that you don't have to chase paperwork all day? Take a look at how your employees are doing business. Document those processes. In the BPMN 2.0 framework, which stands for Business Process Mapping and Notification Framework, it's really, really critical for you to document processes, so understand what's going on. In my experience, we've seen government agencies that do business processes in two different ways when they're sitting next to each other in an office, right?
Accounts payables can be run in five different ways. Accounts receivable can be run in different ways. Payroll can be run in different ways, but do you really need different ways to do the same process? Let's standardize and how do you do that is by documenting your business processes. The next thing to do is based on these business process documentation, is really think about how you want those processes to change. Put your thinking hat on. Have a big vision. Think about what you want your processes to do. How do you want them automated? How do you want reporting to show up? How do you want your people spending their time? You really wanna see how you want to improve your processes. Internally, what we do is we go into our clients and when we document processes, we see quickly that there's a lot of redundancies, lot of roadblocks, lot of duplications, and we start by just taking the vision for the CFO or the city manager or the mayor, and we take those process maps and we really literally chop off pieces that are extraneous, that are useless, that are bogging your processes down.
Business Process Transformation
So take a look at your practices, document them, have a grand vision, and start chopping off pieces that don't make sense. We're not even talking about looking at what system can do this better for us. We're just looking at the vision and how your processes should be operated in the future. The next thing to do is based on your redesign processes. In many cases, you'll have a brand new set of process maps that show you the redesign process. The best case scenario, the pie in the sky, everything you want a modern eerp system to do for you should be documented in the format of a process map. We call these two B process maps, future state process maps, process map visioning. There's a lot of names for these things, but essentially what it tells you is it's a roadmap to your future practices, and these can be as detailed or as high level as you want them to be, and we'll cover that in a future episode of this series.
But the most important point to know is have a grand vision, put it down on paper and really visualize how you want these practices to flow in the future. How do you want handoffs to happen? What parts of the process should be automated? What parts of the process should give you the ready data you need to make decisions on a daily basis? The last thing to do before you go anywhere with an E R P modernization is to really document your requirements based on the two B processes, based on how you want processes to flow in the future. You will take that and distill that into a requirements document, and we've provided samples in the show notes that defines what this new system should do for you. Really, the requirements definition or documentation is a comprehensive document that you can use to go out and purchase a new system or hold your current vendors accountable. If you think you're overwhelmed and don't know where to begin with your a r P modernization journey, or you don't have an e RP system and want one, please go to our website or look through all these videos for some great information on how to start. Thank you.