Managing Your opentaps Implementation Project

This is a general primer on how to implement opentaps, or indeed any similar large-scale system in your organization. Our goal here is to offer you a general roadmap on how to make your implementation project successful. This kind of implementation is a project that requires commitment and time. Often it will require some readjustment once your end users have a chance to try it out. Guidance in these matters follows.

Before You Start

Implementing a business management system like opentaps (or any ERP/CRM solution) for any company is a complex project simply because your business operations are complex. Whether you are implementing for a small company or large multinational organization, we recommend you follow these key steps toward success:

1. Understand the requirements. What does the organization actually do, and how would the people like to do it? Who would be using the system, and what would they do with it?
2. Determine the required budget and commitment of key people, and establish your time line and stages of work. Plan to keep all your key people current with checkpoints and reports versus your plan. Make changes within a teamwork approach.
3. Map out the implementation. Once you know what people need, identify how opentaps could in general support those requirements. Identified what modules and features would be configured and used.
4. Do a pilot implementation for specific users, and processes. This involves setting up and configuring opentaps based on their known requirements and the proposed implementation plan. Train these real users and have them try their opentaps processes and provide their feedback. Frequently, you will uncover new requirements during this phase.
5. With user feedback, make changes to the system configuration.
6. Do successive rounds of pilots with key users and processes until these key users are satisfied with the system.
7. Train the larger group of users on the new system.
8. Move data over from existing systems.
9. Roll-out new system for production use. Keep the existing operational methods available for backup until the system has demonstrated acceptance and stability.

Along the way, it is important to protect yourself against the risk of a failed implementation. The key reasons for failed implementations are:

1. Failure to understand business requirements. If you don’t know what you need to do, you probably can’t do it correctly.
2. Lack of user acceptance. You can’t force people to use your system. Make sure they like using it, or change the system. (Fortunately, opentaps is easy to configure, or even to change or extend.)
3. Becoming too ambitious. When you're moving to a new system, it can be very easy to get overly ambitious and try to solve every single problem in the organization, or to change too many things in too short a time. This is also a time when a lot of pent-up demand for improvements could suddenly appear from every group in your organization. Resist the urge to solve every problem at once. Focus on the "low hanging fruit" first, the immediately achievable goals which would deliver significant value to your organization. Get the system up and running as soon as possible, and build confidence in it for your entire organization. Then you will have the support you need to roll out incremental enhancements over time.
4. Lack of contingency plans. For critical business processes, devise contingency plans or workarounds in case the system is not up and running in time, or if there are problems after the system is up and running. Consider keeping the existing system to run in parallel or devise other workarounds.

Remember:

A successful implementation is usually an iterative activity, of manageable small steps, where basics come first, engaged and satisfied users are essential, and strong steady support of sponsors is evident to all.  Setting realistic expectations initially is very important. 

The Implementation Checklist

Before getting started, you need to capture key information about how your organization operates. This may involve meetings or interviews with all the people who will be using opentaps. This list is by no means exhaustive but rather serves as an example and starting point to organize your project:

1. Accounting
   1. What is your company’s inventory costing method: LIFO, FIFO, or average cost?
   2. What is your company’s accounting year end month and date?
   3. Obtain a chart of accounts for your company and compare it to the default ones.
2. Stores and Sales Policies
   1. Identify each physical and online store which sells your products.
   2. What types of products are sold? Physical goods? Digital downloads? Physical goods with variants? Configurable products?
   3. What categories are the products grouped into?
   4. What sales taxes are charged for your store?
   5. Which customers are exempted from sales tax?
   6. What are the shipping rates for your stores? Are they based on flat fees, percentage of order, or live rate carrier rate estimates?
   7. What methods of payments are accepted, and what credit card processor or payment gateways is it compatible with?
   8. Would you like to send emails to confirm orders and keep customers informed of order status?
   9. Do you offer special pricing to each customer or to groups of customers?
   10. How are inventory reserved against orders?
   11. Do you pay sales commission? If so, to whom? What are the commission schedules and rates?
3. Order Processing
   1. When are orders approved?
   2. Do you accept back orders?
   3. If a customer’s payment method cannot be captured, will you still ship to customers?
   4. Do you offer some customers credit?
4. Returns
   1. Do you accept returns?
   2. Do you give refunds or store credits for customer returns?
   3. Do you refund shipping charges?
   4. Do you charge re-stocking fees on returns?
5. Purchasing
   1. Make a list of all of your vendors, and the products you purchase from them, including the prices, minimum quantities, and vendor specific descriptive information
   2. How is purchasing planned?
   3. Do you drop ship from your vendors?
   4. What terms do you have with your vendors?
6. Manufacturing
   1. Define your products bill of materials (BOMs) and production steps.
   2. Define machine or fixed assets used for manufacturing.
   3. Do you use push (MRP) or pull (on demand) production planning?
7. Warehouses
   1. Define all warehouses where your company stores inventory
   2. Do you have separate locations in your warehouse which are designated as packing versus storage areas?
   3. Do you host third party inventory?
   4. Do you transfer inventory between your warehouses?
   5. Do you have products which carry serial numbers (like a laptop) or lot numbers (like orange juice)?
   6. How are orders “picked” from the warehouse? What is the process for obtaining items which have been ordered from the warehouse?
   7. How are orders packed and prepared for shipping?
   8. How are orders scheduled for shipping?
   9. Which carriers do you use to ship outgoing orders?
8. Customer Service
   1. What e-mail address do you use for customer service requests and e-mails?
   2. How are customer service requests received and processed?

You should also have the following information ready:

1. List of users and their roles and authority
2. Shipping rates charged
3. Payment processor credentials
4. Shipper (UPS, FedEx, DHL) credentials
5. Categories of products
6. Your organization's logo

The Pilot Projects

Each pilot will be a series of meetings where you train a small group of your key team members or leaders to use opentaps, and they work with it to do their jobs. A successful pilot will proceed until the key users are sufficiently satisfied with the system. As you pilot test the system you will note user reactions and their requests for enhancements. When substantial changes seem necessary, estimate the time and effort required for all the changes and negotiate with the key decision-makers about them. Some changes will seem trivial, but they should all be tracked and reported before implementing them, because some requests may be bad ideas that should be rejected on careful analysis.

We recommend that you go through your basic processes one by one during your series of pilots, for example:

• Setting up your organization and users with security
• Setting up products
• Purchasing, including using Material Resources Planning and creating purchase orders
• Receiving
• Sales order entry
• Customer service
• Order fulfillment, including picking, packing, and shipping
• Invoicing
• Payments
• Returns and refunds
• Online store features

A project that makes steady, stepwise progress and gains the involvement and enthusiasm of the early users is on the right pathway to success.