When should your ERP system go live?

Hi Maria,

When you have an elaborate and/or complex go-live plan in an enterprise that runs over multiple days, the risk may dictate that you take advantage of a holiday schedule that corresponds to the beginning-of or end-of a month. Leveraging these types of windows reduces the business’s exposure and provides more opportunities to adapt to unplanned events.

The “business closing period” can be adapted by a few days, and catch-up processing can occur as the first step after go-live. Other assumptions would include; multiple “full processing” dry-runs of the plan and a roll-back option.

Strategic IT and Business resources (in my experience) are willing to put in the extra effort and sacrifice what would typically be family time for these rare project execution events.

Well, my 2 cents would be to have parallel run with dummy data for the users to experience & once end-users are comfortable go live !

It depends on the ERP and the downtime that you need.
For big ERP systems that impact finances we try to "Start clean" on 1st January that we start the fiscal year.
For small manufacturing plants, we usually try to fit it with the quarterly shut down and cleaning.

Thank you, Mayte.
The first case "big ERP systems" - any lessons learned worth sharing with the audience?

I will share a bit of experience with "big ERP systems". The Big Bang/Flip-the-Switch/All systems go live on D-Day approach may involve impacts too large to accept.

It might need to be implemented in stages. Portions of the system may be implemented and validated before others. In a large business, the implementation may be site specific, so Site A can encounter and work through the problems before inflicting them on everyone.

Keith - thank you for sharing your experience.
Yes, there are pros and cons of the big bang versus phased-scenarios.
a) the big bang - such as shorter implementation time and lower costs (on the one hand) versus high risk: business, revenue, reputation, employees (morale), sink or swim for employees, etc. (on the other hand)
b) phased-scenarios (by geography, business units or departments, or by ERP's modules, etc.): lower risk versus higher costs, longer implementation time, and building temporary bridges from the old systems.