Council Post: Your ERP Is Ready To Go Live. But Is Your Business Ready To Run?
Komal Goyal is CEO of 6e Technologies, a Global IT Advisory & Consulting firm in Oracle Cloud, E-Business Suite and Government Consulting.gettySuccessful user acceptance testing (UAT) of an enterprise resou...
Komal Goyal is CEO of 6e Technologies, a Global IT Advisory & Consulting firm in Oracle Cloud, E-Business Suite and Government Consulting.
getty
Successful user acceptance testing (UAT) of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform doesn't mean the business is ready to operate.
In a well-known example, Zimmer Biomet went live with a new ERP after numerous delays in July 2024. The company said that, by the third quarter, it was struggling to ship products, issue invoices and generate sales reports. After a $94 million implementation, the company spent another $72 million fixing the fallout and sued its implementation partner for $172 million. The company attributed the implementation to declining sales and profits as shares fell later that year.
Most ERP implementation failures, though, never make the news. They surface quietly after go-live, when finance and operations teams struggle to keep the business moving, and disruption gets renamed "post-go-live stabilization."
Based on my experience advising companies on ERP implementations, the war room assembles when the business hits operational roadblocks, and leaders find themselves firefighting as seemingly minor issues cascade into major operational failures under production workloads.
The Assumptions That Drag Leaders Into The War Room
McKinsey found that nearly 70% of ERP transformations fall short of their goals. In nearly three decades of running these programs, I’ve rarely seen technology be the main reason.
More often, the damage starts when leaders decide a failed test can wait. A scenario breaks, go-live is around the corner and the defect gets marked “fix post-production.” I’ve seen that become a shipping floor that cannot print pick-slips, forcing users back to manual work and defeating the point of modernization.
Two assumptions usually create that damage.
Believing A Few Successful Tests Are Enough To Validate Go-Live
As the go-live date approaches, it's easy to assume the business is ready because the critical workflows are working.
The SAAQclic project for SAAQ, a government-owned corporation that manages driver's licenses, vehicle registration and auto insurance, showed where that assumption breaks down. Before launch, the project identified 52 readiness criteria, but 19 remained unmet, according to research by Finarch. Final testing relied on fictitious data instead of the real records of millions of residents. Despite those gaps, the board approved the launch.
Within days, transactions had backed up, sending citizens back to service centers and re-creating the queues the platform was designed to eliminate. The fallout eventually grew into a $500 million cost overrun, according to the CBC, and led to the resignation of Quebec's minister of cybersecurity and digital technology, the dismissal of SAAQ's CEO's and an anti-corruption investigation.
While this may be an extreme example, dates often beat testing because budgets are tied to launch. That is why I tell clients to run a separate readiness exercise before the project is locked around a go-live date. Take the go-live date off the table, and the pressure to launch anyway goes with it.
Assuming Trained Users Are Ready To Operate
Early in my career, during a readiness discussion for an ERP transformation, one employee suddenly went silent. Afterward, he told me he had spent years building private shortcuts and undocumented work-arounds that kept the business running outside the enterprise system. The new ERP would eliminate all of them.
He left before go-live. His replacement inherited the role, but not the unwritten knowledge behind it.
Training teaches the process the system expects, but it cannot uncover the undocumented ways people adapted because the old system never fully supported the business.
Both assumptions stem from the same gap: allowing the system integrator to be the sole judge of whether the business is ready to operate.
Readiness belongs to the business. A system integrator can verify that data migrated correctly and workflows execute as designed. Only the business can determine whether the data is trustworthy and the process reflects how the business actually operates.
How Leaders Can Prevent The War Room
In ERP implementations, I’ve seen both successes and failures. But the successes had one thing in common: an independent readiness check. This check has to happen in two places: in the business and with the people who run it.
Rehearse the business where it can break.
During implementation, leaders must ensure project teams do the following:
• Prioritize UAT around workflows that could halt operations after go-live.
• Test realistic exceptions, including mismatched invoices, missing data, stuck approvals, changed orders, inventory gaps and unreconciled reports.
• Use an independent third party to challenge test scripts, SI outputs and sign-off quality.
• Assess defects by business impact, including delays to billing, shipments, payroll, financial close and compliance.
• Define who can accept risks, approve work-arounds, pause critical processes or delay go-live.
But even the best-rehearsed process is only as strong as the people expected to run it. That is where readiness moves from the business to the user.
Coach users through the real work.
Before go-live, leaders must ensure project teams:
• Put actual users through scenarios involving stuck approvals, mismatched invoices, missing fields, incorrect inventory and unreliable reports.
• Observe whether users move forward, freeze, return to old processes, open Excel or wait for direction.
• Support users during UAT so they can raise defects, validate processes and escalate issues correctly.
• Test beyond the happy path by creating scripts for exceptions, breakdowns and scenarios unique to the business.
• Coach users to decide when to resolve, escalate, pause or flag a wider process risk.
• Identify hidden work-arounds like spreadsheets, side tools, manual checks and tribal knowledge the ERP may remove.
Leaders who avoid war rooms do not hope the final stretch before go-live will hold. They prepare before the pressure begins.
Prepare To Win
A go-live is no less than a battleground, and prevention always beats cure.
Soldiers don't march out and hope. They arrive ready, with a plan and the right kit. At the Battle of Midway in 1942, a smaller U.S. force defeated a larger Japanese fleet because it prepared first, read the enemy, fixed what was broken and rehearsed before the day.
That is the lesson. Do the war room work early, and go-live stops being a day you survive. It becomes a battle you've already won.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?