With Unit4 Business World (Agresso) ERP implementations and upgrades, one of the most obvious, but often underrated elements is choosing the right Agresso consultants or partner consultancy to work with.
There are of course many important factors, but ensuring you have the right expertise on board; that is both aligned with the overall objective for the project and more importantly in sync with the culture of the organisation. This is a huge factor to a successful project.
All ERP solutions, including Business World (Agresso) have evolved dramatically over the last few years, with Cloud, SaaS and hybrid offerings (to name a few).
Yet the overall pool of potential Unit4 Business World companies who can assist with implementations and upgrades hasn’t changed that much.
There are the large consultancies, the vendor Unit4 itself, as well as the Unit4 partners and lastly, there are a growing number of independent consultants that have particular specialisms and expertise.
Choosing the right way for you, let alone the specific consultants has never been easy but the stakes may be higher today as new cloud and hybrid Business World (Agresso) implementations often function as the centrepiece of an organisation’s digital transformation efforts.
Let’s face it, the margin for error is very small on an ERP project and many of the businesses and organisations I speak to can’t afford to screw up because the impact is enormous and potentially quite devastating! So what should you bear in mind?
The most significant difference between choosing Agresso consultants today compared to in the past is a greater emphasis on soft skills. For instance project and change management and ensuring a cultural fit between organisations.
While ERP has always been and remains a massive lift from a technology standpoint, cloud-based delivery has taken some of the ‘sting’ out of deployments. Plus these days, most SaaS ERP tools limit an organisations ability to customise the software to their business processes. Instead, organisations moving to cloud ERP need to modify their business processes to fit the constraints of the software and there is often a greater emphasis on integration with other enterprise systems.
Mostly, you still need expertise around data migration and implementation, but change and transformation management will ensure you’re not just implementing an ERP system that your users will resist when it comes to go-live.
There have been some recent high profile examples of Unit4 Business World (Agresso) implementations where this was their downfall.
Avoid Using Just One Delivery Partner
If you can walk away from this article with anything, this is arguably is the best advice… Restricting the choice to a single solution partner is a mistake many organisations make, but they can easily avoid it.
For example, a local authority might bring in a traditional upgrade partner or work with Unit4 directly to handle the functional, software-specific work, while enlisting a different type of consultant to focus on project management or change management.
For an implementation, you could use Unit4’s Value Accelerator (VA) approach, alongside specific groups of independent consultants that specialise in their individual fields. Depending on the size of the organisation you could also bring in independent change management consultants, or for larger scale projects look at consultancies that specialise in that field.
There are also bands of consultants that focus specifically on certain areas of the business world, such as HR/Payroll, Reporting etc.
What we’re really trying to say is that you don’t have to put all your eggs into one basket… Most of the highly successful projects have involved multiple sources working together to get the job done, each with their own specific task that they specialise in.
Nobody sets out to fail an implementation or upgrade project. ideally, you want it done on time and on/under budget, but by considering your options carefully and not relying on just one source, you can give yourself the best possible chances.
If you are planning an implementation or looking to upgrade/add new functionality to your Unit4 Business World (Agresso) ERP system, do let us know how you plan to deliver the project.
If we can help you in any way to support your project plans and suggest alternatives that may be of benefit to you, then please do reach out for a no-strings-attached conversation.
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