ERP Transformation Roadmap

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1. Business Model Canvas

Before you define an ERP transformation roadmap, you need to understand your business model. Your business model shows how you create and deliver value to your customers and how you generate revenue. You need to know who your customers are, what they need, and how you meet their needs. You also need to know the key activities and resources involved in your business.

You can use different techniques or frameworks to describe your business model and how you create value. One framework that we'll use as an example is the Business Model Canvas, developed by Alexander Osterwalder. It's a simple, holistic, and easy-to-understand way to represent your business model. You can use it to map your existing business model and to highlight what aspects of your business model are changing. Then you can align your ERP transformation strategy to these changes.

2. Define Transformational Goals 

Factors that disrupt your business model can kickstart your transformation. You need to define your transformation goals in business terms, with measurable metrics that you can track over time. These goals might involve several milestones and phases.

Let's look at an example. Your goal is to create a 360-degree view of your customer. You want to see things like their activity history, product purchases, and subscriptions. But this goal doesn't relate to a business outcome or a measurable key performance indicator (KPI). A measurable goal for your digital transformation could be to increase upsell to existing customers by X percent, or to reduce the time to address customer queries by Y percent. To achieve this goal, you need a 360-degree view of the customer.

Although most programs start with a set of business goals, it's important to communicate and remind these goals to the IT and technical teams that implement the solutions. In long-running transformation programs that involve several technologies, teams and partners might lose sight of the actual business goals and focus too much on the technology.

3. Identify Triggers for Change

Your business model can be disrupted or influenced by various factors, both internal and external. These factors create opportunities for transformation. In a world that's changing faster than ever, you need to adapt your business to meet new customer expectations, improve customer experiences, and attract and retain talent. The opportunities for impact are plentiful.

Here are some examples of factors that can trigger changes to your business processes and applications.

 

• Changes in customer segment
• New channels
• Changes in value proposition
• Changes in customer relationships
• Changes in revenue streams
• Resources and sustainability
• Custom manufacturing
• Partnerships and acquisitions
• Cost and efficiency
• External factors 

4. Prioritize Business Processes

The next stage is process discovery, which involves key business stakeholders. With a clear view of your changing business model and transformation goals, you can identify the related business processes and applications that need to change. The discovery exercise should focus on creating clarity around how the business processes and applications need to evolve to meet the transformation goals.

The scope of change might include automating a manual activity to improve productivity, capturing data accurately to improve the effectiveness of strategy, driving user efficiency, or eliminating data siloes to generate insights about your customers.

You should prioritize the changes to maximize and deliver measurable business value continuously, without having to wait for a multi-year transformation program to complete. You should keep the business transformation in the foreground, with engagement from the business, users, and executive sponsors. Business agility should be the key focus for long-running, comprehensive transformation, or you risk missing business opportunities and losing market share.