This Beyond the BC Bits blog series focuses on the non-technological factors that play a crucial role in determining the overall success of an organization’s Business Central implementation project. The goal is to highlight and provide guidance on many of the major factors that will most significantly impact your project’s success.
Part 1 of this series covered how to properly prepare for your implementation project, while Part 2 covered how to work with a Business Central partner, Part 3 covered the best practices for managing the implementation project, Part 4 provided strategies for how to approach training and testing of the application, Part 5 offered some considerations for when and how to effectively build customizations to the software, and Part 6 focused on how to optimize and plan for the migration of data into Business Central.
In this final article in this series, the focus is on the long-term ongoing operations of Business Central after the "go-live" has been completed. Topics will include how and when to make a determination that the implementation project is complete, tools and techniques for ensuring that the system is operating at optimal capacity, and how to work with your Microsoft partner to ensure that continuous improvement of the system in order to maintain a continuous return on your organization's investment in Business Central.
"Live" does not mean "Implementation Complete"
The first thing that must be clearly understood by the entire project team is that the implementation project is not complete at "go-live" or once users have begun processing real transactions in your Business Central's production environment. Rather, the "deployment" phase of the implementation project does not end until every process has been completed in Business Central at least one time. Yes, you're up and running, but you're not at the finish line yet!
Typically, the deployment phase of the project should end when all G/L Accounts have been fully reconciled and accurate financial statements have been generated from within Business Central for the first month of activity. Very often the first month-end takes longer than expected due to the adjustments and training required internally to close the first month, so plan to allow for at least one to two additional weeks to produce the first months' financial statements. Therefore, the deployment phase of the implementation project typically ends approximately 6-7 weeks after the initial "go-live".
Project Complete vs. Tasks Finished
One of the most common mistakes made is failing to celebrate the completion of the implementation project. The reason for this is that after the initial "go-live", it takes over a month to produce financial statements from within Business Central and as time passes, people tend to focus on what lies ahead. Also, it is very common for a "punch list" of open issues and tasks to exist that may take several months to complete and it seems like the project has never ended.
Because of these factors, organizations often fail to ever formally acknowledge that the implementation project has been completed and that the organization has entered a new stage of "Ongoing Operations". This failure to recognize and congratulate the implementation team for successfully deploying Business Central and completing the primary mission of the project does a disservice to the entire project team who took on additional work throughout the implementation project.
There will always be open issues that need to be resolved and there will always be additional features and functionality that need to be deployed. Take the time to formally thank the project team and acknowledge their effort with some type of celebration shortly after the first month-end has been processed. This recognition will not only provide a mental uplift to the project team, but it will also return the team to a new and improved state of "business as usual" and also will encourage current team members or others to participate in future projects, knowing that their contributions will be recognized and rewarded.
Organize a formal Project Closeout meeting to thank the team and confirm the remaining tasks and issues that need to be resolved. If there are additional tasks to be completed (often referred to as "Phase 2 Tasks") this meeting is an excellent opportunity to review the list of these tasks and build a prioritized plan for addressing them. Finally, this meeting is a great opportunity to discussed the lessons that have been learned throughout the implementation project so that future projects can be improved.
Expect and plan for ongoing costs
As noted above, the reality with any ERP solution is that there is never really a point in time where the organization is finished with investing in the ERP environment. This is particularly true in the new world of cloud-based ERP solutions such as Business Central where the publisher (Microsoft in this case), is regularly updating the environment and releasing new and improved features throughout the year. The solution is not static, or unchanging, as it had been in the past, and therefore your organization must plan on continuing to invest in Business Central to ensure that the system's capabilities are being fully utilized to improve your operational efficiency and reporting capabilities.
It is difficult to accurately estimate what type of ongoing investment should be planned and budgeted for because each organization is unique and has differing expectations and goals for the level of continuous improvement within the organization. However, if you do not have a budget set for maintaining the system and supporting your user community, each expenditure on Business Central will be viewed as an unanticipated cost and treated as a negative incident. With a pre-set monthly budget for maintaining and improving Business Central, these tasks become expected and appreciated incidents. In this environment, users feel comfortable and confident to report suggestions for improvement that will benefit the organization. Twice per year, Microsoft deploys a major update for Business Central that contains many new features. Your organization must be prepared to spend the time and resources to review these new features and determine which (if any) should be utilized to improve your user communities experience with Business Central.
Keep the Momentum Rolling
Immediately after completing the Project Closeout meeting, ensure that your entire Business Central user community has a mechanism for reporting issues and suggestions. This can be as simple as a group email distribution list to your internal IT department, or it could be a formal support ticketing system. If users are unclear on how to report issues or suggestions, they will just "find a way" to complete their job, regardless of whether this is the right or best way to accomplish the task, and more importantly regardless of what the downstream impact might be on other users. Shortly after "go-live", it may seem like the flood of issues and requests will never end, but rest assured that if the issues are properly resolved and user documentation or other training materials are provided to the users, the issues will slow down and users will continue to gain confidence in the system as they become more and more familiar with how to leverage all of the features and functionality within Business Central.
Also, if there are any "Phase 2" projects or tasks that are still to be completed after the initial "go-live", these should be planned and prioritized during or immediately after the Project Closeout meeting. These "Phase 2" tasks do not need to begin immediately as sometimes it makes sense to provide the team with a break from implementation tasks - either due to your organization's seasonality, approaching holidays, or just the need for a break. But it is important that these projects or tasks are formally planned and communicated to the team because very often some users have had to delay the deployment of features they need to effectively do their job, and it is important that the users understand that there is a plan to get these features deployed.
As a reminder, your approach to the implementation of Business Central should be "crawl, walk, run" (the logo for this entire series) and therefore the initial "go-live" should have included only the absolutely required functionality to operate the business and therefore at least some "Phase 2" projects and tasks should exist. The good news is that these "Phase 2" projects and tasks are often much quicker and easier to deploy since users are already familiar with Business Central. You may also find out that some things that were previously considered essential by the user team are now no longer needed as users may have found other (better!) ways of accomplishing the task in Business Central without the requests that were previously essential.
Build an annual system audit plan
Over time, users change roles within the organizations, and also users come and go. This means that there are continuously new users that must be trained on how to properly use Business Central. However, very often there is very little formal training provided to new users. The result of this lack of training is diminished knowledge of the system and the increased potential of users processing transactions in ways that do not follow the original guidelines and workflows. Therefore, it is important that an annual system audit be completed.
Each organization will have a unique "System Audit Checklist" for Business Central, however it order to ensure the integrity of the data within Business Central, it is critical that at least once per year a system audit is conducted. Examples of what could (should) be included on such an audit checklist is a review and confirmation of User Permissions to ensure users are properly authorized to access data and processes within Business Central. From a financial reporting perspective, it is important to ensure that Accounting Periods and Inventory Periods are being properly maintained. This type of annual internal audit can save your organization quite a bit of money if you consider the additional expense of an external audit when an improper lack of controls is identified and must be remedied after the fact. Even by providing an outside audit team or bank with each of your detailed system audit checklist reports will provide much greater confidence in the financial statements that are being generated from Business Central. I would personally love to see organizations completing such audits on a quarterly basis, but I won't push my luck. Remember: Crawl, Walk, and then Run!
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