One of our proudest accomplishments as a company is that we have completed over 100 successful go lives with Microsoft Dynamics AX. It’s fair to say you’d be hard pressed to find another partner with so many successful, industry-focused deployments. With all that experience under our belt, we’ve learned a few things along the way.

1. Work Hard. Be Honest. Be Nice to People. Ok, so maybe we started the business following these principles, but they are still our number one priority, and the single most important thing about our business. At the end of the day, implementations are people projects, not software projects. We’re incredibly conscious of the way we engage with people, the values of the companies we work with, and we’re asking people to make significant changes in the way they do business. It isn’t easy, and we respect that—because without that respect, projects fail.

2. Go in with a road map to success. Every implementation partner goes into a project with the goal of a successful go live—it just takes some folks longer to get there than others. We’ve meticulously studied and documented what it takes to not only go live on time and on budget, but also what documents and templates a company needs post-go live to ensure that they feel confident with the product after the implementation team has said their goodbyes. We call this toolkit QuickStart and we’ve found that, on average, it shaves about a month off of implementations. Pretty sweet, right?

3. Conference room pilots, conference room pilots, conference room pilots. We won’t pretend that CRPs are anyone’s idea of fun, but there’s a reason we insist on conducting at least three prior to going live—sometimes things go wrong! Successfully implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX is walking a fine line between an art and a science. CRPs ensure that the kinks get out of the system well before the official go live.

4. Better to do one thing well than many things poorly. We often get asked why we don’t branch out into other solutions, verticals, or product lines. The answer is simple: Microsoft Dynamics AX is the best Tier One ERP system on the market today, and we’re the best at implementing it for apparel, footwear, home goods, and durable CPG brands. This intense focus and experience in these industries has led to an intimate understanding of the complex business processes that make them successful.

5. Stay in it for the long haul. Along the way to this milestone of over 100 successful go lives, we learned that sometimes customers may not have the in-house help they need after our consultants go home. We always knew that an implementation didn’t end at go live, but for a while, we didn’t have a process to manage that post-go live relationship. As an extension of our business values and principles (see numbers 1-4) we created Sunrise Global Support. Sunrise Global Support is…exactly what it sounds like. A global network of support personnel that is available 24×7 for any of our customers technical needs, because we know business never stops and glitches don’t wait for Monday.

We’ve learned a lot over the last 100 go lives—and we’re positive we’ll learn more as we keep going. Here’s to another 100 go lives and many more after that!

If you are a part of a large (or growing) organization, you’re probably interested in leveraging your human capital across multiple business units, divisions, regions, or brands. In a relatively short amount of time, shared services have proven to be a popular way for companies to reduce costs, improve customer service, and increase process effectiveness. In fact, in 2011 89% of global executives reported that they thought sharing services was a strategic choice for their business. ¹ Yet, these benefits have only become truly feasible in the last few years thanks to advances in business applications and information systems.

With so many advantages to implementing shared services, it may be tempting to get started right away. Before you start consolidating divisions left and right, here are few things to think about to make sure you take full advantage of shared services in your organization:

First, you should define which functions can be shared across your organization. A good place to start is internally facing functions like financials, human resources, information technology, etc. Even in a very diverse organization, these areas are most likely to have enough similarities in methodology and practice that shared services could be easily implemented.

The next thing to think about is creating clear definitions of organizational hierarchy and boundaries. Who can have access to which data? What kind of security settings are required? Can business workflows be directed to shared services for approvals? Taking time to lay out the ground rules and access permissions now could save a great deal of pain later.

Speaking of hierarchies and boundaries, this brings up the most important question. Can your business systems run both shared and segmented functions under a single platform? Shared services personnel won’t be as effective if they’re asked to jump from one application to the next to complete daily operations.

It’s clear that shared services are here to stay, but it’s also not something to rush into. Just imagine how many integrations, security setups, workflow modelings, and data synchronizations must be developed and configured to make shared services work! It’s pretty easy to see why a comprehensive IT strategy must be developed first to realize all the benefits of shared services in the long run.

If you do decide to go the shared services route, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft Dynamics AX is particularly well suited to handling shared services. For example, take a look at the screen below (Click the image if you’d like to see a bigger version.)

In this view each shared service is clearly defined and is treated like any other organizational structure.

Whether you already have shared services or are thinking about implementing them in your company, it’s always a good idea to make sure you clearly define the functions of your services, set appropriate boundaries, and, ideally, run them under a single platform like Microsoft Dynamics AX.

¹ The Shared Services and Outsourcing Revolution is Here, Shared Services and Outsourcing Network, 2011.