Common pain points in supply chain planning software implementation include data quality (issues with quality or availability of data), change management, and project fatigue often driven by the complexity of the project coupled with unrealistic expectations. How should companies address these issues to ensure a smooth implementation?
In this soundbite from one of our webinars, Ruth Abbott and Paul Mackie of John Galt Solutions explore some of these challenges, why they can make or break your implementation, and how to tackle them. At John Galt Solutions, we address these and other common challenges in implementation projects with a clear, structured agile framework, with defined milestones and a timeline to keep the project on track and within budget. We believe that each phase must end with a tangible outcome: a live capability that delivers measurable business benefits.
Our Pathways to Evolve is a value-driven methodology designed to help you start wherever you are in your supply chain maturity journey and accelerate toward your vision of planning excellence, while strengthening adoption and confidence in the system.
Learn about best practices for successful implementation and how to get quick value from your supply chain solution in our blog: 5 Ways to Fast-Track Value from Your Supply Chain Planning Software
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The second factor is usually how quickly an organization can actually handle that change. So, the change management process is vital. Understanding the impact that that project will have on teams and individuals and their roles being realistic about that change process, and how long it can take people to really feel comfortable with that change, adopt that change, perhaps a new way of working.
The 3rd point here; project fatigue is something that is quite often overlooked, but the success of a new project can quite often depend on what's happened before, and the enthusiasm of people to really embark on something new. Was there a previous project that didn't go very well? Or is the organization running multiple projects at the same time, often pulling on the same resources and stretching them time and time and again.
If a project drags on for too long, you might start to lose valuable people and resources in the business as well, and we see churn in those project teams.
So, Paul, if these are some of the risks that we see, how does John Galt help to mitigate these risks in a project?
Paul Mackie: Absolutely, Ruth. One of the things that has helped John Galt be successful in delivering these projects on time is the specific tactics that we use to avoid those major pain points.
Probably, the one that affects the most projects – and affects basically every project – is that question of data. There is also the question of how we're going to make sure that we have the buy-in to this project, particularly in environments where maybe there are multiple competing priorities or multiple projects back-to-back.
So, to deal with those we have kind of a unique project methodology that begins by tackling those 2 biggest pain points right up front in a stage called project readiness. Project readiness involves 2 major elements. The 1st element is actually getting as much as possible a clean extract of data that we're going to be using for the remainder of the project and defining to, you know, probably 80 - 90% what the data will look like for the real implementation.
The other thing we do is make sure that we go through an outcome alignment process with the executive team, and the purpose of that is to make sure that in these environments with multiple competing projects, it's clear the value of the Atlas Project, because oftentimes you're competing with, you know, maybe an ERP upgrade, or, you know, maybe something more operational, or maybe something that might be more from a reporting standpoint. And it's often important to point out that, you know, supply chain planning is going to be fundamental to getting the value out of some of these other projects, and there's huge ROI available with a relatively short timeframe.
So, in the project readiness phase – before things really kick off – we make sure that we tackle those problems so that the timeline is more likely to pan out. That really handles the project fatigue and the data elements of the pain points.