When businesses want to grow, they work towards pursuing new customers, penetrating new markets, launching new advertising strategies, building new partnerships, and more. When these measures are successful, substantial growth transitions from dream to reality. Revenue increases, and businesses are empowered to hire additional talent, create employment security, open career paths, and increase payroll for employees—extending success to those who make it possible.

Such growth is a victory worth celebrating. But it also presents new challenges and complexities—or growing pains. These growing pains come in many forms, like facing larger competitors, juggling unfamiliar regulatory requirements, managing more inventory, and maintaining relationships with more customers.

So, growth leads to change, and change creates challenges. The trick is to turn those challenges into opportunities—but how?

Maximizing growth and building opportunities does not have an easy button. Keeping pace with growth requires simultaneous organizational and cultural changes. Growth will be slow when companies continue to rely on disjointed processes or antiquated, disconnected technologies.

To spur growth, businesses pursue digital transformation. They invest in comprehensive business management technology—like cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions—to bring order to chaos and manage all the changes growth brings. This requires change management: switching from familiar, comfortable (but limiting) processes to better (but unfamiliar) processes.

What Change Management Looks Like for an ERP Implementation

Change management means exactly what it says: managing change. New things are happening, and you are taking care of them.

Switching to a new ERP system is a transformational change involving significant shifts in strategy, structure, performance, and processes. In many cases, this means leaving behind disjointed systems and manual—even paper-based—processes in favor of a solution that can automate time-consuming tasks, provide a single source of accurate information, and increase efficiency and productivity.

Change management is at the center of every transformational shift to new technology—guiding businesses, standardizing the digital transformation process, and comforting employees with new roles and other changes to the status quo.

After letting employees know about the change(s) to come—and ensuring the change will be positive for their daily responsibilities—it’s critical to create a change management plan. The plan must be thorough, realistic, and strategic, outlining what organizational goals the new modern ERP system will help the company achieve, how implementation success will be measured, what roles and responsibilities the implementation will involve, and how the timeline and scope of each project phase will be defined.

The change management plan may begin with a business review that answers several critical questions:

• Why are existing processes in place?
• How will the new ERP system impact individual roles across the organization?
• How will leaders communicate plans, updates, and the reasons for (and impacts of) changes throughout the implementation process?
• How will the new system achieve company objectives and provide a solid return on investment (ROI)?

If this sounds complicated, that’s because it can be—if the company doesn’t have the right support for each step in the ERP implementation journey. That support must come from people with extensive knowledge, not only about the ERP software, but also about the company itself, its industry, and its unique needs. That’s why choosing the right ERP vendor and implementation partner is just as important as picking the right software.

Choosing the Best Support for Success

Every company embarking on an ERP implementation journey needs to partner with the right vendor and experts, who will provide a structured change management methodology and address potential issues before they arise.

The right ERP solution will offer multiple forms of support—including direct from the vendor, through a network of partners or value-added resellers (VARs), and through free online training and a user community. During the implementation process, the vendor and ERP partner or VAR should:

• Help the company develop its change management plan.
• Oversee the business review, working directly with the organization’s leadership team.
• Explain each step of the process in detail.

Change management is not a “one-and-done” event. It doesn’t end when the ERP system is up and running. Instead, it enters a post-go-live phase during which the ERP implementation partner helps the business continually analyze processes to further assess key changes.

In some instances, like companies moving from paper-based systems or QuickBooks Graduates moving beyond their basic accounting software, the new ERP system will bring standards and best practices to which the business is unaccustomed. Some employees may prefer legacy processes—not because they work better, but because they’re familiar. Having the support of the right ERP vendor and implementation partner can help those employees embrace the change.

Embracing the Change with Acumatica Cloud ERP

When a company chooses to switch to Acumatica, we don’t want to simply copy and paste their original business processes into the new system. We want to help them revamp their processes and embrace an improved, streamlined way of operating. Sometimes, this may be an entirely new process, while other times it may blend old and new methods into a hybrid configuration perfectly matching the company’s requirements.

We work diligently with our partners to provide a level of expertise and change management best practices that facilitate timely implementations, ensure smooth transitions, and help users clinging to the legacy system across the digital transformation finish line.

Other companies are already reaping the benefits of embracing change with Acumatica. For example, consider Sunshine Lighting.

Sunshine Lighting, a 43-year-old company offering some of the world’s most tech-advanced lighting solutions, was floundering with extremely low-tech processes. They were using a legacy system, which might have been high-tech in the year 2000, augmented by spreadsheets and lots of printed, paper lists. Papers kept getting lost. Updates could not be communicated between departments. Reporting was all but impossible, and, according to Vice President Joel Gross, something as simple as a license registration could have put the company out of business.

Sunshine Lighting needed to make sweeping transformational changes across the entire organization—bringing their disparate processes together under a single, comprehensive business management system. And they needed to do it immediately.

After reviewing SAP Business One, Sage, and a cloud version of Infor, the company chose Acumatica because of its robust reporting, its ability to provide operational efficiencies, and its configurability, which could easily handle custom business processes.

With the help of Acumatica and its VAR partner Appsolute Consulting, Sunshine Lighting easily managed changes that altered the business to its core. They revisited every single organizational process and revamped them to optimize operations and reduce manual work. As Schneur Perl, Sr., Technical Project Manager and Business Development Manager, puts it: “Acumatica gave us a heart to our business. Now, if we need to do something, we learn how the system can do it, and do it, which has changed our culture.”

The implementation was so smooth that the company stayed open throughout the entire process. After go-live, employees quickly took ownership of their roles and came up with ideas for accomplishing even more.

Sunshine Lighting is now redefining their growth strategy, and they credit Acumatica for giving them the confidence to accelerate and push the envelope.

Conclusion

In every growing business, change is guaranteed. Whether that change is adaptive or transformative, it must be carefully managed to ensure continued, stable advancement—turning challenges into opportunities.

To learn more about change management practices and about digitally transforming with Acumatica, contact our experts today.