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Equating ERP education with School education
The (universal) problem:
It is always amazing to see the enterprises of today, jumping into an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system without really analyzing their own understanding about an ERP or even worse what their business needs are. Most of the times SMEs tend to be over-confident and expect that their ERP should do everything for them.
The reality:
An organization does not grow overnight. It is a gradual process to equip an organization with appropriate IT tools based on the stage they are in since inception.
Let's compare our own schooling. It takes 10 full years of basic education and 5-7 years of higher education before we could call ourselves qualified to begin our career in a chosen field. Yet going by the current educational effectiveness, even these many years wont get you an employable candidate! You have to spend a few months or even an year to get a fresh graduate to become productive (or employable) in the industry.
This being the state of an individual, we can now think of how an organization or company should get on with its strategies to get into IT, more specifically rolling out an ERP. In the early years of an organization's existence if a simple yet comprehensive ERP that covers the basic departmental activities of an organization need to be adopted, it needs extensive pre-schooling in ERP for the employees. However, this could happen by gaining insight into existing processes and mapping them to Open Source License FREE solutions like Samooha-S that can be rolled out after certain professional training provided to users about ERP and then conducting mock implementation exercises within the ERP User groups formed in an organization. The education of ERP can be obtained by exposing the User Groups to ERP software solutions like Samooha-S that are available in the Open Domain. After a few cycles of exposure, exercises and reviews, the organization should plan for live roll out which could require professional support and management from the shortlisted ERP vendor or their implementation partners .
The possibilities:
Although, ERP is an essential exercise for any emerging organization right from its inception, the best time to introduce the concept of an ERP is when the enterprise gets into its second year of operations so that the solution can be understood well during the whole year to make it effective from 3rd year for all the users to manage the organizational growth.
Sufficient budget and most importantly time and effort need to be allocated for education of all the users of the organization so that the ERP should be welcomed by them as a tool to aid their daily activities rather than giving them a nightmare of their own elimination from the job due to automation of their business processes.
Starting early with education would reap great results for an organization.
To conclude this article written out of real life experience it is suggested that you, the entrepreneur, top manager or the professional who is supposed get on with an ERP should remember that you and your neighbor went to the same school and paid the same fees. However, what you are today is due to your own exposure, experience and efforts. Your school does matter, but your own efforts and commitment matters more to your success. ERP is no different. The software matters, but your own education, exposure, efforts and experience to leverage the ERP you adopt gives the ROI, not the software itself! Good luck.
© Copyrights Rajesh H A
This is an article based on Asian Enterprise experience written by Rajesh H A of Samooha Business Platform Project ( http://samooha.sourceforge.net ) This article can be reproduced as is without any permission provided this Copyright notice is displayed.
