Discover today’s enterprise business management solutions

You don’t have to be a CFO to appreciate ROI

As your business grows, you need software that can keep up with the evolution. Aligning technology with your business objectives is the best way to optimize your investment. With quick implementation and clearly defined metrics, your progress toward established goals can be easily measured. This ROI Improvement Guide will give you the tips you need to search and review business management solutions, plan for the future, and maximize profitability.

Six simple steps to optimizing implementation

1/ Establish an executive committee and a core project team

Keeping things on track is crucial. Establish an executive committee to sponsor and oversee the project, and a core project team to take ownership of the implementation, drive the project and train end users. The project team should include managers from all the business units that will be impacted by the implementation, such as customer service, logistics, finance, and manufacturing, as well as an overall project manager.

2/ Aim for specific goals

Faster, higher quality business decisions due to end users entering data more efficiently. This results in the summarized information needed by management and executives becoming more accessible, more timely, and more meaningful.

Greater employee engagement and productivity as employees can use their time performing more strategic and meaningful activities. The operational efficiencies gained from the implementation also leads to improved employee retention.

Get closer and be more proactive with business partners, customers, suppliers by optimizing and shortening business processes.

Remember: As implementation begins, you should review these goals, incorporate any changes since the business plan was developed, and keep them in mind as you proceed.

3/ Have a clear understanding of what the software can do

With a business plan based on features and functionality, the implementation team should go through introductory training to gain a more in-depth understanding of what is possible with the software’s capabilities.

4/ Define business processes that need improvement

Confirm that the processes defined prior to implementation are being achieved and ensure that nothing has been missed. An implementation advisor may also provide recommendations on

improving business processes based on best practices from other customers. You can also streamline your processes by using out-of-the-box capabilities based on industry best practices.

5/ Consider your implementation options

When choosing between on-premise or on-demand implementation, organizations should look at their particular

requirements—including the complexity of their business and business processes, size of their company, number of employees, expected business growth, and the sophistication of their IT skills and infrastructure.

On-premise: Because you own the software and it’s installed on your servers, it can be customized and integrated with other software. This provides organizations with their other software greater control over their business processes and business data.

On-demand/In the cloud: Hosted and available over cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis, this solution does not require a large up front investment, can be implemented faster with less IT staff, and limited hardware maintenance

6/ Train end users

Training, along with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface ensures that employees can get up to speed more quickly and cost effectively, and using the new business management solution.

Define and measure key performance indicators (KPIs)

During the implementation process, functional teams should define the metrics they intend to measure against to determine the success of the project. These metrics should align with business units, departments, and employees to effectively indicate whether goals are being achieved.

The KPIs you create should also track qualitative benefits. Specifically:

• Error-free processing
• Time required to make better decisions
• Reduced inventory levels
• Improved customer and partner satisfaction index

Once your KPIs are defined, it’s best to publish and communicate expectations so you can continue to measure and improve for the future.

Ready to do this?

With the right KPIs and a plan to track them on an ongoing basis, you can determine whether the system you have in place is helping you meet business objectives. This way, any necessary course corrections can be made to keep their efforts on track. Now that’s a new way of doing business.

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Note: Content for this post was originally posted on Sage Canada