Introduction & Training program for BPA Awareness

An introduction & Training program should be organized for half day / full day for all the concerned employees/ staff. Head of Departments/functional heads and senior & middle Management cadre should be given total overview of BPA, its implementation strategies, its important features & benefits. This will help smooth sailing of implementation of BPA across the organization.

Complete Implementation of BPA

Once the pilot implementation is in place, the complete system implementation needs to be carried out. All the learning should be documented & incorporated into a system. This is accompanied by identifying similar project team if it at a different location. All the above steps can be followed. The training and support issues of the system need to be looked at carefully by the original project team. A separate testing team needs to be appointed for auditing the system. Once the system is certified as approved the complete operations can be shifted to the new system at all locations.

Why Implementations fail

The statistics prove that about 50% of BPA implementations fail. Lets face it, it has never been easy to implement enterprise systems. Stories of failures of ERP, CRM and SCM implementations are legion. However, a proper understanding of the reasons why most implementations fail can help in avoiding the failure in your organization. There are several reasons why BPA implementations fail. One of the top reasons the BPA implementations fail is that you have not been able to motivate your employees to adapt themselves to the new system. When the pressure gets intense they switch to their tried and tested ways of old times. The job of the Champion is critical here. The Champion needs to have motivated the employees to be extremely motivated to use and adapt to the new BPA system. If there is failure here, then it can jeopardize the whole project. However, the project can still be salvaged by a renewed effort of the Champion to motivate the employees for adaptation. The next level of failure can be low quality training. If the training is not able to impart the requisite knowledge about the system and the method of feeding and retrieving the appropriate data from the system, then the project could be heading towards failure. Again, a second round of training could save you from this situation, if you are in it. The next level of failure is improper implementation, i.e. taking more time then planned, going over budget, requiring more resources than visualized, and improper compatibility with current systems. This becomes a more serious issue and coming out of this situation unscathed is difficult. However, at the end of it still you can have a working system. The next few levels of failure arises out of not testing out with pilot projects, not doing a proper sales process audit, not translating the strategic goals into appropriate quantitative objectives for the sales department and no process reengineering. These failures are very costly and cannot be afforded by any organization. The topmost level of failure is not having project buy-in from the top management. If there is no project Champion at the top executive level or the person is without enough clout then the budgets and resources will be squeezed, the objectives of the project will be doubted and the deadlines for the project will be unrealistic. This situation clearly predicts a failed project.

 

Training Project Team

Pilot Implementation