Why preparing your business is crucial in a digital transformation

Better to prepare than to repair

Imagine you’ve just acquired a piece of land, ready to transform it into your dream home. Now, before the construction crew starts laying bricks and pouring foundations, you wouldn’t simply dive in headfirst, would you? You’d want to engage the expertise of a skilled architect to plan and design every aspect of your future home, ensuring it aligns perfectly with your needs and desires.

Well, much like building your dream home, successful ERP implementations require a similar level of thoughtful preparation. In both scenarios, the key to achieving a result that truly reflects your vision is to design a well-thought-out plan, crafted by the right professionals.

Understand your business processes

So, before you implement any kind of new technology in your organisation, make sure you thoroughly analyse and understand your business processes. Modelling those can help you understand weaknesses, and it allows you to show your stakeholders exactly where and why structural changes are necessary. Furthermore, the model contains vital information for your IT team and implementation partner.

Our specialised business analysts can assist you in drawing up a Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)-compliant model that documents all existing and upcoming business processes, including process owners, key users, and integrations between units. That will enable you to proactively manage the expected changes and their impact. Based on our strong expertise within SAP technology, we tend to use SAP Signavio, but feel free to suggest any other tool that your organisation prefers.

Tailor-made change management

Technology informs key business decisions that determine your success. Ultimately, however, those decisions are made by people. With an effective change management strategy, they’ll know how to apply the new technology and how it will contribute to your organisation’s vision and goals.

Change managementis a specific skillset – so why not get outside council? Find a sparring partner to set up a customised change management strategy that suits your organisation and its objectives. Whether you aim to reduce costs, optimise internal processes or something else entirely, our dedicated change managers will involve your employees by means of the Prosci ADKAR® methodology:

• Awareness of the need for change;
• Desire to support the change;
• Knowledge of how to change;
• Ability to demonstrate skills and behaviours;
• Reinforcement to make the change stick.

Does your staff need additional training to become more familiar with the new software? We’ll map out all necessary courses with Enable Now, though we can easily integrate the tool of your choice. Additionally, we’ll develop a communication plan to inform all stakeholders and address any concerns they may have.

Align different perspectives

Your business, IT team and implementation partner all view the digital transformation from a different perspective. While your organisation understands the current business model best, the IT team expertly knows how the outdated and new technology supports those processes. The implementation partner, on the other hand, offers several years’ experience in implementing the software in different industries.

Bridging those knowledge gaps is essential for the alignment of processes, people and technology that will make your digital transformation a success. Sounds daunting? No worries – our experts are here to help with the tools, templates and expertise you need.