Migrating from a Legacy Systems to an Enterprise System (ERP) is a Journey

Migrating from an existing ERP system requires “all hands-on deck” for several months and sometimes years. No stakeholder (internal and external) is immune to the changes that are required in the migration.

Management, from the Board of Directors, Executives, and Functional and Department level managers should acknowledge that an ERP migration is both a major opportunity and major challenge.

The ERP migration should be addressed as only one component of a Business Transformation. The other components that must be addressed are the organization structure, the people, the business policies and processes, and the performance metrics management relies on.

A Business Transformation is a journey from the current state to a future state defined by Management as a Vision. The journey must be planned, managed, and tracked from the beginning to a target date (months past the ERP go live date) that Management expects to realize value from its investment not just in technology but also in people, policies, and processes.