When the management of a company decides to acquire a new ERP system for its accounting, sales, manufacturing, inventory, or other functions, one typical reason is to improve its efficiency in processing its business transactions and to maintain good and consistent records. The company's ability to manage its transactions and records will often have deteriorated due to company growth, industry growth, downsizing, or some other valid reason. The computer can help re-establish control and efficiency, and it can also establish a new foundation for the growth of the company.
However, the new system cannot take poor discipline and poor records and create manageable information. The client must start with good, consistent, organized records and good procedural discipline for the new system to have a chance for success.
The best way to determine whether the new system will be beneficial is to look at the client's staff and their workload, and to analyze the information and the procedures these people use and produce.
If the bottleneck is the volume of work they must do, and not the quality of the work that is produced, then a computer system can definitely help right away. If the problem is the quality of the work, then another task must usually be accomplished before computerization can begin.
Of course, sometimes even quality processes cannot keep all of a company's functions and records up with a growing volume, and therefore quality suffers somewhere. In this case, the functions that are under control might be computerized first, then with the extra time the system provides the staff, they can improve the quality of the other functions in preparation for computer implementation. This situation is quite typical, and it simply dictates a "phased" system implementation.
For example, in a growing manufacturing environment, we might find that the component inventory is not being controlled as well as the invoicing and accounts receivable function. And although no one can argue with these priorities, the lack of inventory control can be very costly, and the investment in a computer system can have a quick payback.
In this case, we would probably recommend that the functions that are under control (invoicing and accounts receivable) be implemented first. The lack of a working manual system in component inventory control will cause its computerization to take significant extra time and effort. This extra time can be created by the system, after implementation of the functions that are working well.