Senior Functional Consultant Kat is one of our supply chain experts, and when she’s not advising clients, she can be found spending time in the great outdoors with her horses.
1. What is the #1 sign that a business is ready for an ERP?
Number one is when we see a business outgrow its previous management tools and processes. We might see a business start to drop things that previously they had been able to manage with the tools they had in place, and we can start to see the customer experience suffer as a symptom of that.
2. What are the top pain points you help businesses with?
Without the right tools in place, lines get blurred in a business, so I might see a warehouse operative tackling invoicing which clearly isn’t their area of expertise. But segregation of duties was created for a reason, and when we see people taking on responsibilities that they’re not trained to do, they become distracted from their core role which can lead to challenges. It also means that a business can never be clear on exactly where the gaps are because they can be disguised by scope creep from another department.
One of the major things I do for almost every customer, is help them direct responsibilities to the correct departments – letting everyone get on with what they do best 🙂
3. What do you think is the key benefit that retail businesses can gain from integrating a bespoke stack with an SI like Flintech?
The thing that Flintech does really well, and for me, the difference between us and other SIs, is that we understand that our jobs are not just about implementing a system. We have heritage in the sectors we operate in so when we arrive to help a company we have the idea that it’s just as much about business consultancy as it is about the implementation.
It means we have an understanding of where a customer’s business is heading and an ability to map the ERP to the future business state, which gives it true longevity and makes it as beneficial as it possibly can be.
4. What is the number one challenge for businesses looking to undergo digital transformation?
It has to be change management! Companies do well with their implementation when they communicate early on, and to every level of the organization, the ‘why’ of the implementation. It’s really important that no one is left wondering why the implementation has to happen, or why it’ll benefit them to get involved.
When plans are communicated early on, and there are regular touchpoints throughout, those are the implementations that do well.
5. How can businesses benefit from the increased data provided by an ERP?
For me it’s not about more data, it’s about the right data and the right structures to analyze it. This is exactly what an ERP can help with.
It might seem trivial, but you need to plan and plan well to be effective as an organization, and you need data to do this, but that data needs to be real-time and appropriate and presented in a format that actually means something to people.
6. What is the one thing you wished every customer knew about systems integration and ERP prior to implementation?
Knowing just how long an implementation can take, and why it takes as long as it does.
When we complete a full-scale ERP implementation, we’re setting everything up to be automatic, taking a series of manual processes and turning them into a fully integrated and automated process. That means it’s a huge amount of work that goes in upfront to set up those processes so they can make the time savings for the business later on down the line.
