ERP Success

What skills and experience does a Subject Matter Expert need to be effective in an ERP implementation programme?

Obviously they need to be experts in their subject matter, whether that’s Finance, HR, procurement, payroll or whatever. But beyond that, what else?

The ERP Academy defines industry standard definitions for a number of ERP roles, including Subject Matter Experts. Using this as a starting place, I have described the required skills below. I’ve then gone on to describe some of the desirable knowledge and experience that a SME should ideally have.

You are unlikely to find a single person who ticks every box. The final recommendations will help you prioritise what you consider to be most important for your organisation and how to address any skills gaps.

Required Skills

Adaptability

Continually improve and set high standards for service provision. Is flexible in accepting and evolving to change. Learns and adapts quickly to new skills including innovation and digitalisation of services to support improved outcomes

Data Use

Uses data and insight effectively to monitor operational performance and to inform problem solving, decision making, considering benefits and risks to service delivery

ERP Implementation

Understands the ERP implementation lifecycle and the activities in each stage. Knows the main risks in an ERP implementation and how to mitigate these.

ERP Management

Manage the ERP successfully to meet the needs of the organisation. Maintains an excellent working relationship with HR and Finance leadership teams. Meets service level agreements for support. Manages system updates effectively. Delivers continuous improvement.

Project Management

Plan and manage a project effectively, understanding dependencies and risks. Maintains good relationships with stakeholders and able to manage the project team effectively to deliver on time to budget.

Knowledge and Experience

In addition to the skills listed above, a SME will benefit from having knowledge and experience in the following areas:

Knowing how this organisation currently works

Organisations tend to evolve their own flavour of standard business processes, be that Purchase to Pay or Hire to Retire. These change over time to meet the needs of the organisation and also reflect the preferences and skills of the people in the organisation.

A common driver of change is a negative internal audit report: a criticism of expense claims not being coded correctly, for example, may lead to an extra check being introduced to the process to check expense codings before they are approved. This may be introduced as a temporary measure but it ends up staying because it’s easier to leave it in place.

Introducing a new ERP creates the opportunity to revisit these processes and clean them up, but simply rolling out a new process without understanding how it differs from the current way of working won’t land well. The SME needs to be able to highlight to the business change team the need to prepare the organisation for this change.

Knowing the key people

There are two groups of people that an SME should know: those in positions of authority, and those who are influencers through their expertise or force of personality.

Knowing the people in positions of power and having an existing good working relationship with them will greatly facilitate getting decisions made at pace. A senior functional leader is more likely to trust someone from their own team that they know and respect to have the best interests of their team in mind. They are more likely to delegate more decision-making authority to the SME.

Knowing those individuals in an organisation who have significant soft power or influence is almost as important, as these people can have a far greater impact than their job title would suggest. Getting them on board with the programme early will reduce the likelihood of them creating difficulties and obstacles further down the line.

Experience of working on an ERP programme

It’s common for SMEs to be picked from the internal functional teams and assigned to the client-side programme team. They are unlikely to have any recent experience of working on an ERP programme and so will not know what to expect. They won’t be aware of the journey ahead, what the main risks are and the common issues.

Some organisations take the route of bringing in an experienced contractor to cover the SME role. This can bolster the expertise of the client-side team while avoiding taking experienced people from the business as usual functional team. Obviously, being new to the organisation, they will not know the organisation nor the people, so will have to work hard to get up to speed and build relationships.

Recommendations

The normal advice is to take the best people from the business as usual functional teams and assign them to the ERP programme as subject matter experts. They can then be backfilled so the teams are not under-resourced.

The more you can prepare these people for the journey ahead the better. One way of doing that is the SME training course on the ERP Academy, but getting them to conferences and events where other organisation talk about their ERP implementations is also helpful.

You may choose to bring in an external SME if the internal functional team is already struggling with a lack of experienced people. In this scenario removing one of their key people could adversely impact the BAU service. It’s a difficult judgement call: the functions won’t want to lose their best people, but having the best people on the programme is they can ensure that the new system will meet their needs.

Using external subject matter experts raises the risk that the functions feel that the new ERP programme is being done to them rather than done with them. That lack of ownership can cause adoption challenges and prevent the organisation from realising the benefits of the new system.

A large an complex organisation may benefit from a blended approach, but this would probably be unaffordable for a small organisation.

Knowing the risks of each option in advance allows you to prepare for and mitigate them.