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Deploy ERP- For a software project to be truly agile, collaboration across all involved departments needs to be practiced at every phase, including testing and evaluation. This can be vital when it comes to ensuring constant innovation with minimal missteps. One area that can benefit from deployment in an agile manner is enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Benefits of agile for ERP
Organisations can’t afford to stay still for long in this increasingly competitive climate, and an agile approach to ERP can ensure that projects meet the long-term goals of the business.
“In the ‘connected world’, modern businesses, whether in industry, retail, healthcare and so on, will outperform their competitors when all aspects of their operation are joined up,” said Colin Crow, managing director at Sigma Dynamics. “ERP represents a significant tool to help join the dots, and so the question of how best to implement arises.
“Whether an Agile or Waterfall approach is best for your business, or even a hybrid combination of the two, should be considered along with your ERP partner.
“An Agile implementation model drives a more iterative and incremental approach to deploying ERP, allowing customer and partner teams to constantly adapt, deliver benefits in increments and demonstrate progress to the team and the business as a whole. This constant delivery of progress is infectious and motivating.”
Crow went on to identify further benefits that Agile brings:
- “It’s managed by a team comprising all workstream representatives from the customer and partner;
- “There’s a clear understanding of the goal, along with built-in in steps to get to that goal;
- “Constant adaption and learning, as well as delivery of incremental value;
- “At the end of every iteration, the team re-evaluates and improves the approach;
- “The habit of frequent delivery is a self fulfilling prophecy.”
A collaborative process
The collaborative nature of Agile, bringing a number of departments together to make thoroughly thought-out decisions during initiatives, can complement ERP through keeping targets clear to business and IT staff.
Charles Courquin, director at Symatrix, explained: “The modern day Cloud ERP solutions lend themselves well to an agile delivery approach through every phase of the project lifecycle; the process is well accepted in the market today and a number of ITTs have been issued in recent months asking for ‘a MVP ERP solution’. The modern day SaaS ERP solution is similar to the Model T-Ford of yesteryear; it comes in any colour as long as it’s black. The solutions, due to the fact that they have regular quarterly or 6 monthly updates, are designed to be ‘configured’ and not ‘customised’ as the original on-premise pre-cloud solutions tended to be.
