Let Your Customer’s Journey Guide Your ERP Solution
The following is a Case Study to demonstrate Withum’s Construction and Advisory Services Groups’ expertise working with a construction client to create customized technology solutions.
Challenge
For many organizations, selecting software to improve operational efficiency is not an easy task, especially for organizations that do not intently follow the software market but are anxious about making long-term decisions. And let’s face it, the technology landscape is changing so quickly that it can be difficult to keep up. Our client, a large diversified construction company with multiple subsidiaries and operations,had software that became obsolete and was no longer being supported by its vendor. Like many companies, they also had additional systems that were linked to the legacy software ecosystem that would require updates or new connections to be established. The construction company had two options: upgrade their current ERP to the latest software or choose a new software solution entirely.
The proposed software solution needed to comply with the industry standards and meet efficiency objectives. This included having an integrated system that allows a single source of information to support the finance and operational functions, the ability to comply with union payroll, manage vendors’ compliance, and access real-time analytics. The new ERP system would also need to support the legacy systems (i.e. scale software) that would live in their new ecosystem.
Approach
We opted to leverage a current state, future state and technology roadmap with a twist of using a “customer journey” technique. The technique focuses on the impact of customer (internal and external) interactions throughout key business processes on the new system(s). Current state is established using interviews and collaboration workshops to discuss company needs in order to align clear goals and future state vision. Withum’s Advisory team then developed a technology roadmap that would be deployed in the new system.
The technology roadmap, coupled with our expertise, enabled us to identify three potential software solutions. Each software vendor met with Withum to prepare for the client demonstration using the use cases and company data we gathered. This approach engaged the customer’s end users to identify and contribute to the software selection and allowed the vendors to get a better understanding of the organization. This “customer journey” technique enabled the organization to utilize their use cases and actively contribute to identifying the solution.
Conclusion
Selecting a new ERP software system is a difficult decision and making it work with other technology solutions is a daunting process. In this case, we were able to facilitate the client’s software selection, which made them more knowledgeable and able to achieve an on-time and on-budget software implementation. Withum’s comprehensive experience as well as our “customer journey” technique helped guide our client into making informed decisions, placing them in a position of strength.
