Most ERP programmes start with a long conversation about software, from which platform to choose to which system integrator (SI) should implement it. It’s an understandable place to begin, but today, technology has become the most dependable part of the journey. Enterprise platforms have stabilised over years of development, and the SIs that implement them arrive with a standardised approach they’ve refined many times over. “It’s no longer about whether the software works,” says Andrew Kekana, SAP S/4HANA Materials Management Consultant at KPMG. “It’s about how you implement it in your specific environment.”
The risk now sits in culture, change fatigue and siloed ways of working, which an integrated ERP system tends to expose very quickly. When change fatigue sets in, people push back, and teams that still work in silos feel it first because an ERP system is designed to make every department work as one. “People and change are absolutely critical. A very close second is data, making sure it’s complete, cleansed and transformed appropriately,” explains Anele Sokhabase, Associate Director and Head of IT Internal Audit and Governance at KPMG.
More than a date
Go-live is the date everyone on an ERP programme works towards, but it says very little about whether the investment will pay off. Every programme is approved on a business case, whether that means reducing costs or protecting revenue, and Kekana believes that should set the pace. “The business case must be the driver, and not necessarily the go-live,” he says. Pressing ahead while training and adoption are lagging can undo the benefits the programme was meant to deliver, and once a system goes live, there’s no reversing the decision. “You have to measure the success of a project using three pillars: cost, quality and time,” advises Sokhabase, who says that meeting the deadline without the quality the organisation expected is just as much a failure as running late.
Independent programme assurance places a third party between the client and the SI – two parties that share the same goal but don’t always share the same interests. An SI wants to succeed, and under pressure a problem can go unreported in the hope that it sorts itself out. Assurance is designed to catch that early, and it works differently from a traditional audit, which waits for a process to finish before validating it.
“Programme assurance is like crystal ball gazing. You’re trying to identify risks that haven’t materialised yet but will, and help the team think about what it can do to prevent them,” says Sokhabase. That could mean reviewing how a business case is put together before it goes to the board or flagging low business involvement while there’s still time to fix it.
“We give an opinion and we don’t instruct,” says Kekana. “We identify risks and possible ways to mitigate them, so management can take action while there’s still time.”
Built to fit
Before an assurance plan is drawn up, KPMG uses its Global Enterprise Transformation Tool (GETT) to find where a programme’s risks sit. It works through seven domains and 49 dimensions in a workshop with the client and produces a heat map of where assurance is most needed. The plan that follows is aligned with the phases of SAP Activate.
“It allows us to co-create an assurance plan with the client, so we’re not parachuting in a plan we’ve done for someone else,” Kekana explains. Greenfield, brownfield and cloud programmes each need assurance to look in a different place. A greenfield programme starts from a clean slate, so change and data carry the most weight. A brownfield conversion keeps existing processes and centres on the technical upgrade. With cloud, data sovereignty comes into play, although Kekana says local data centres have eased much of that concern in South Africa.
Leadership capacity is one of the most practical risks on any programme. A number of the programmes Sokhabase has worked on over the past three years have been worth more than half a billion, and at that scale the executives with the right capability are often the ones with the least time. One delayed decision can hold up several workstreams, and this can set a programme back by a year.
For Kekana, any leader preparing for an ERP transformation needs to think about people on three levels – who sits on the programme, who cleanses the data and how ready users are to adopt the new system. “The technology will work. What’s going to decide the success of these huge transformation programmes is really the people’s side,” he ends.
Share
