Through the primary and secondary research, this assessment digs into your datasets, transactions, and processes to identify the core reasons for current challenges, a strategy to solve current issues, and a phased approach to execute recommendations.

This phase takes a deeper dive into the phase I identified in the previous step with the highest financial reward and least disruption to the business. It continues with the deeper discovery of current processes through workshops with key users and identifies processes and datasets that need to be re-engineered in the to-be state. Finally, this phase maps transactions and datasets that need to be exchanged in the to-be state across systems new or existing in a vendor-agnostic architecture.

This process identifies the critical success factors that are the major cost drivers for the implementation. How about their financial risks? Yes, that matters too. These factors are also the drivers for the demo script during the vendor reviews. This step provides clarity to the executive team so that you don’t make a wrong decision by focusing on unnecessary details and instead miss the most critical factors that will make or break your ERP implementation.

This step aims to perform the fit-gap analysis of each solution that is a front-runner. In addition, this exercise helps identify the configuration, implementation, and custom development effort required with each solution. Finally, this step also helps understand the total cost of the ownership and the ROI, along with any financial risks that need to be discussed and agreed upon before finalizing it.

This process coaches key stakeholders on the red flags with each solution, provides a matrix to help with decision making, and identifies the areas for cost savings through negotiation with each solution provider. This phase also vets the implementation plan from each vendor involved and creates a roadmap for implementation with clear roles and responsibilities for each vendor.

This step is repeated until the project achieves business value, user adoption, enterprise architecture compliance, and the functional completeness goals of the system. This step also monitors the budget for the overall project and communicates the pivot strategy at each step if we uncover any surprises during the pre-selection and selection phase. And throughout the process, the key users are involved in making critical decisions. So they own them and are committed to adoption.