ERP Consulting: Understanding the Business from End-to-End

Opportunity

A new ERP implementation was being rolled out to a new region. Documentation on the company’s business processes for production planning, materials management, sales and distribution, service management, and financials and controls needed to be updated to reflect current state processes in regions where the ERP had already been implemented, to support testing and development of the latest version of the system.

Solution

Pepper Foster was engaged to work with the leaders of each of these business areas to update any existing documentation, create new documentation where needed, and identify any gaps or redundancies in the documentation. Pepper Foster held dozens of workshops with the business leads and their team to walk through the business processes. The information from these workshops was incorporated into flowcharts documenting the business processes. In addition, Pepper Foster created a walkthrough for the system testing effort that combined the high-level business processes with step-by-step work instructions and test scenarios, so users in the new region would have all of the information they needed when sitting down with the system for the first time.

Outcome

Within days of the resulting documentation being uploaded to the company’s internal file-sharing system, the business leads began to use the documentation to push for process improvement, and help current users better understand the system and the business processes it supports when troubleshooting errors.