ERP FAQs

That’s great, we can review these, once we have done this, we can perform Discovery quickly to confirm the documentation. We can then use discovery to fill any gaps or answer questions that may have arisen. As our team have had professional, industrial lives before Gradient. This isn’t that they know best, just that they all can bring this practical experience to any discussion, whether Financial, Manufacturing (Planning, Scheduling, Shopfloor, Optimisation), Supply Chain, Warehouse, Projects, Enquiry to Order, CRM and Marketing.

Part of our unique USP is that all our team have worked for a living across various different types of businesses. They bring a huge amount of experience, you don’t have to explain how a business works, just get on with your issues, we will ‘get it’ shortening the time for Discovery.

We have the privilege of seeing your business for the first time and can see opportunities and ways of working that your internal folk can’t. Not that we are more clever, just that it is really difficult to step back and take an agnostic view of processes if it is a working method that has been used over years, like a recipe, you know if you follow ‘this’ it works. Also as an SME, your staff have day jobs keeping the business running. We can do the legwork.

We can still help you by giving direct support and advice to your own Project Manager, as well as offering a more independent view of project progress and most importantly ensuring best practice is followed to reach a successful go-live.

Implementing a new ERP system can be a complex process. From our years of experience and specialising in this type of project, we can offer you a proven methodology of project governance to support you and achieve a successful implementation, on time and within your budget.

Yes, as part of the specification process we will begin to discuss your plans for implementation and how we can support you with this. As well as elements of project and change management, we can also support you in other tasks such as process design, documentation and testing.

We will work with you to agree on a suitable timetable and scope for vendor demonstrations. We can then determine some small subsets of your data which we can forward (redacted as necessary) to the vendors to build into their demonstration. Seeing real rather than dummy data will greatly help you understand how a new solution might work in the context of your business.

We do not have preferred solutions as in this process we remain vendor and solution agnostic. However, once we fully understand your processes and future requirements, then using our experience we are able to draw up a long list of the most suitable vendors to approach.

This will depend on a number of factors. However, we’ve seen this process typically take 3-4 months although it can be completed in less time if necessary.

We use a tried and tested scoring system as part of the initial rating of the responses to the SoR (Statement of Requirements) from the long list of vendors. Once we have a shortlist, we will invite vendors to demonstrate to you how their solution will meet your requirements.

We will confirm with you the functions you wish to include in the scope of your new solution. We will then meet with your functional representatives to confirm both your “as-is” processes and your target operating model.

We will draw up a clear timetable of both the specification and selection processes and share a tracker to allow us to collaborate on workshops, document review and sign off and vendor responses and demonstrations. This allows you to focus on ensuring we fully capture your requirements.

This will depend on a number of factors which we will discuss during the discovery workshops as well as a part of understanding your strategy for the future. Do you have the time, resources and capability to transform? Might it be easier to transition now and transform once you have a new system? Are there external forces that may determine which route you take?

As part of our selection phase, we will hold a series of workshops by functional area for us to understand how your current processes and system work today. We will then confirm this back as a series of documents including workflow diagrams where relevant. We will also ask you where you see current gaps, what manual processes you wish to eliminate and any other requirements for your future state. We are then able to prepare a formal Statement of Requirements (SoR) to share with selected vendors.