Installing an entire ERP system at your company is no small feat. It requires a large investment of both time and money. With the stakes so high, how do you protect your investment and ensure success? How do you avoid a colossal failure? A good start is knowing what pitfalls to avoid. Here are five common reasons why ERP implementations fail: 1. Unrealistic Timeframe It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes on the client side to implement an ERP system. For an implementation to be successful, the company’s internal team must be involved in every step of the process just as much as the partner doing the actual implementation work. Sometimes clients fail to realize that if they’re working 40 hours a week and they want to put … [Read more...] about 5 Common Reasons ERP Projects Fail
Selling online? Tips on drop shipping and sales tax
Black Friday is quickly approaching, which means stores and online sellers are gearing up for their biggest selling season of the year. Smaller companies frequently use drop shipping, a method in which a seller takes orders but then uses a third-party wholesaler to actually produce the product and ship it to the customer. Avalara, the leading provider of cloud-based sales and use tax management solutions, cautions that this "win-win" solution can create headaches when it comes to properly managing sales tax. Read the entire article. … [Read more...] about Selling online? Tips on drop shipping and sales tax
Project Management Aids ERP
What You Can Do to Help Your Project Succeed While the definition of success on a project is different for each organization, there are some actions that any company can take to help the project succeed. In addition to benefiting from the expertise of a skilled project manager, here are five actions that your company’s leadership can take internally to ensure the success of your implementation: Engage Leadership – Buy-in and engagement start from the top. Business resources will take direct cues from and often react in alignment with their leaders. The company’s leaders can show engagement via early communication of support. Throughout the process they should focus on the goals of the project and continue to reiterate them, ask … [Read more...] about Project Management Aids ERP
Knowing Risks Benefits ERP Projects
Boyer & Associates’ new project manager, Beth Steinkopf, is helping us better manage our clients’ ERP implementations. Last week we discussed how her past experience is already helping our clients. This week Jack Boyer asks Steinkopf how early project management can get your ERP implementation off to a great start. Jack: What are the most important elements you focus on early in a project to help clients ensure success with implementing ERP software? I like to understand why the client has chosen to implement the new software. What are their goals? Understanding this helps define where we are going and allows us to refocus the troops if anyone starts to deviate from the initial plan. It also helps to create a baseline. ERP … [Read more...] about Knowing Risks Benefits ERP Projects
Project Management Affects ERP Projects
Boyer & Associates recently hired a new project manager, Beth Steinkopf, to help provide better management of our clients’ ERP implementation projects. Jack Boyer sat down with Steinkopf to discuss how her background as a PM helps clients who are in the process of updating their ERP or accounting software. Jack: You have experience managing elements of larger ERP projects. How are smaller ERP projects similar and different to the larger ones in your experience? Let’s start with different: Smaller ERP implementations move FAST! They have fewer stakeholders, they generally have only one or two key decision makers, the owners are directly involved, and the processes around the project are typically less formalized. Items that are very … [Read more...] about Project Management Affects ERP Projects
Why BI360 Is a Great Nonprofit Budgeting Tool
Budgeting is a key activity for nonprofits. To address this need among our large nonprofit client base here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Boyer & Associates has done a number of things over the years. Most recently we added BI360 as a budgeting, reporting and planning tool earlier this year. We did the research and learned that BI360 already works with our three existing products and has the option to stay in Excel or publish reports to an easy portal that works well on phones and tablets. These are the Top Ten things nonprofits like the most about BI360’s budgeting features: Your budgeting administrator can tell your budgeters exactly what to do and when. There’s no more chasing down multiple spreadsheets and … [Read more...] about Why BI360 Is a Great Nonprofit Budgeting Tool
Is Data Warehouse the Best Tool for Nonprofits?
When you have decisions to make but an overabundance of data, how can you make the best decision? This is where data warehousing can be helpful particularly for nonprofit organizations that pull data from multiple data sources. This article explains how a data warehouse can improve management and analyses of your information from Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics SL or Dynamics NAV. What Is a Data Warehouse? A data warehouse (DW) is a multi-dimensional database or a virtual storage unit that houses diverse transactional and operational data sets. Think of it this way: if you could add a third dimension to an Excel spreadsheet, you could organize all of your transactional and operational information. Management of DWs involves a technical … [Read more...] about Is Data Warehouse the Best Tool for Nonprofits?
