You just went live…now what?

Mike Pereira is Sunrise's Vice President of Global Customer Support and one of Sunrise's longest-serving employees. Mike has over twenty years of experience and a deep background in apparel and textile management as well as manufacturing supply chain management.

Data migration issues — the first wave

People are surprised at how quiet the first week after go-live can be. If you did all your testing and gave yourself plenty of time and CRPs, transactions should be flowing through your system without a hitch. The first thing you might encounter are data migration errors. These usually happen because business users have only interacted with the old, migrated data before, and any issues that existed could throw errors in the new system. It’s important to clear out these data migration errors first, before too many pile up.

Special cases

It’s impossible to test every possible scenario prior to go-live. The second wave of issues you might encounter are the outliers — one-off scenarios you didn’t have time to test. These are to be expected (after all, you have to go-live at some point, right?) As users start adding new master and transactional data, these corner cases become obvious. The intersection of data and business processes can create unique, unexpected situations. If your project team handles these cases as they appear, you should be fine.

Helping new users

You’ve conquered any migration problems and taken care of the corner cases. The last thing to look out for are user errors. We consider these issues the most dangerous because if they aren’t dealt with swiftly, user errors can snowball into an avalanche of problems that affect the whole organization. For example, an employee from merchandising might forget to associate the cost for a new product. The warehouse then receives the product at zero cost, and now the fix requires several financial transactions and lots of time. During this time, speed of resolution is key. If errors are being created faster than resolutions, that’s a problem. Your project team and your organization’s power users should work on clearing out these errors and reinforcing best practices among the rest of the organization.

Avoid the “Valley of Despair”

The Valley of Despair is when your ERP’s performance drops dramatically, shortly after going live. Users might get frustrated, disappointed, and wonder if the project was even worth it. Guiding users around this metaphorical valley of despair is why your project team should stick around a little longer. The real benchmark people should focus on is closing the first financial period in the new system.