Maintaining an older ERP solution that is no longer aligned with your growing business can feel a little risky, like gambling. Why? There’s a risk of disruption to your business and unplanned costs.
Though, unlike a real gamble, you’ve most likely had an extensive ERP selection process to identify the best solution for your business requirements. If you need an ERP upgrade to replace an aging configuration, you have a good idea of how your business requirements have changed over time and what you need now. So let’s assume you’ve made the decision and prepared your team for the upgrade…now what?
Gaining the House Edge with Easy On Boarding
QAD customer JCM Global designs, manufactures and distributes cash handling and management solutions for the gambling, vending, kiosk and retail industries as well as a variety of other industries around the world. Their business was experiencing great success and company growth, but JCM was managing their manufacturing operations with an older version of their ERP system. They recognized that the needs of their growing company weren’t in sync with the system and made the decision to upgrade.
JCM had reached this decision before, but as is common with so many companies, they were worried about the associated cost and disruption of upgrading. After all, statistics show 57 percent of ERP projects take longer than expected to implement and 54 percent exceed projected budget targets. These concerns had delayed previous upgrade plans and so they turned to QAD for support. The QAD team suggested JCM utilize the QAD Easy On-Boarding (EOB) process to make the upgrade more efficient and less disruptive.
EOB is an implementation methodology based on industry best practices for companies looking to address these very concerns. It’s a scalable solution that offers predefined processes, cost projections and a project timeline to ensure deadlines are met.
One of the major benefits JCM realized with the upgrade was the elimination of hundreds of customizations. Over time, they had added these customizations to the system as a way to ‘make things fit’ without upgrading. The result was a rigid system that had become unaligned with their individual business needs. An upgrade was necessary and provided JCM a much more agile and flexible ERP solution.
“Easy On-Boarding was a major help in doing the upgrade,” comments Joe Jobson, Head of IT for JCM. “We had workshops at the beginning with executive and department head levels which established a roadmap for us. We used a lot of the EOB documentation and processes. There were extensive check lists to follow that walked us through the process.”
Doubling Down on QAD
It’s true. Major business systems shouldn’t feel like gambling, but there are risks to consider. JCM and the QAD team looked at all the available upgrade options and worked together to find the best path. JCM minimized their risk by using tools like QAD Easy On-Boarding and, in the end, the payout was big.
For the full story about JCM’s upgrade and the benefits they realized, check out their case study.
