Control Your ERP Destiny: Reduce Project Costs, Mitigate Risks, and Design Better Business Solutions Kindle Edition

This book is written bluntly. Which, as a management consultant who has implemented ERP systems for 20+ years is refreshing and business leaders should pay attention. In my experience, most ERP programs are severely hampered by lack of business leadership involvement or lack of knowledgeable resource participation from the business. Sure, consultants and IT staff cause problem too, but more often that not, those problems are fixed. It's really hard to create a good system that the users will find productive if they don't participate adequately and it's almost impossible for them to participate without leadership involvedment. Bottom Line Up Front: ERP is a team sport and NOT an IT project.

Good and practical read with a heavy focus on the systems side. Infrastructure and related application stuff is barely touched upon.It contains a number of good lists that are a good start point to become checklists without being rigid.

As someone who has gone through an ERP system implementation, I can say that I wish I had read this book before I started. It is packed full of practical advice and rings true throughout. If you are about to embark on a project or simply need some reminders, I highly recommend reading this book. You will surely find many things you can put into place to make the process go more smoothly.

I wish this book is published 15 years earlier when company I worked for decided to implement SAP ERP. The book has mentioned at least 50% of the troubles I met. If the steering and core team of the project had learned most mindset from this book, implementation should be 100% more successful and 30% reduction of cost. As a retired CIO & 3rd party independent ERP project manager, I always recommend my clients read this book before survey stage of ERP Project.

As a practioner and implementer of ERP systems for 20-plus years I must say this book is breath of fresh air in a usually stuffy topic area.The author preaches a product agnostic way to think about the selection and implementation process of ERP systems. Very insightful. There is also a lot of solid project management knowledge covered along the way.I would make this required reading for anyone contemplating an ERP system in their future.

Some generally sound advice, but not enough details to be a meaningful guide.

Our company is starting an ERP project and we bought this book as a reference. It has proven to be very informative and a good guide as to what we need to do when and different things we should be thinking about during the different steps of the project.

I felt the amount of information was a bit more than I wanted or needed. I also didn’t like the flow, felt it could’ve been more terse and closely tied to the lifetime of a project.

I liked the book so much that I read half the book in one day and other half few days later. I was looking for a Perspective on ERP implementation from the user point of view and this book fits perfectly. I agree with the author that the user needs to take a proactive role in ERP project implementation, even though there may external consultants and vendor support. Those who wish to be thorough in the process of making a big ERP selection and implementation , then this book is a must read. I believe that this book should be treated like a reference book and referred whenever one is looking for guidance at that particular stage.

Once you read it, you will really be in a different position to implement your ERP.

Excellent book filled with lots of practical advice about implementing an ERP system. This has clearly been written by someone who has experienced many implementations and understands the practical side of implementation and not just about creating and following a project plan. I think back to now to the £1000's of pounds I have seen wasted on consultants and will certainly work with them in a different way from now on.

This book is the book I would have written, if I had had the time, to tell the sum of experiences implementing business application software in the last 25 years plus. When I worked as a consultant around the year 2000 there was a lot of demand for implementation and in those years, I worked for a small consulting firm that did an excellent job at implementing ERP, and frankly Mr. Phillips book is a very good elaboration of what we used to present to our clients prior to implementing an ERP solution with them. Surprisingly, a lot of the newer projects I’ve come across recently continue repeating the mistakes that I was seeing 10 to 12 years ago; so for this reason alone the book is very much welcome to put some lights on the reasons things don’t always go exactly as planned (which they rarely do anyway) and to work with this reality to increase the chance of success on such endeavor.Mr. Phillips starts by making the ultimate responsibility of implementing such a solution very clearly on the organization. How often have I seen clients talking about “your” system and “your” project… I was correcting their words at least on 50% of the projects. It is not about consultants doing an implementation to a client, it should be about consultant helping clients implementing their system. The author illustrates the consequences of leaving it to the consultant, and I can attest he is very right: I’ve seen them all.Before implementation, one company must select the software itself, the consultant and the internal team that will take part of the project. The book provides everything to find the right software (from the right vendor), the right consultant and the right people on the team. I can honestly emphasize on the book’s comment that a lot of the ERP difficulties I’ve seen are related to the availability or weakness of the internal team. And the people are the most important single element that will make the difference in an implementation.The book also contains numerous examples of deliverables that should be expected from the project, the attributes and responsibilities that the roles of the different team member should exhibit. Example of the project team structure, even rule of thumbs for estimating the duration, total work and budget of the project are also generously provided.However, numbers provided should be taken with a bit of caution. There are so many factors (all exemplified in the book) that come into defining the effort, the duration and the cost of such a project that it is almost impossible to come with usable rules of thumb. For example, I’ve seen successful ERP implementation of around 5 months, with 3 to 4 full time consultants and at least twice that number of internal team members. So the estimates of project provided for small (less than 125 users) implementation might be on the high side. Also notable is the absence of an example of a risk management approach during the project. Issues are largely discussed but I find that the nuance between issues and risks are sometime not well understood and better risk management very often prevents issues from showing up in the first place.Nonetheless, you do not want to start any business solution projects (ERP, CRM, PLM, DM and all the like), whether it be a new implementation or an upgrade, without having read this excellent book. All of these projects are about transforming a business, and technology by itself as very little to do with this, whatever the software vendors would like you to believe.Highly recommended reading for anyone looking for a successful implementation.

This is a pretty darn good book. As someone going through ERP implementation, I've learned some really key tricks to make sure I keep the project management, like avoiding management coming in and asking for additional features during the process (feature creep).