Breaking silos: The 7 step approach to successful cloud ERP transformations

As digital transformation accelerates, many large companies continue to rely on outdated and ineffective strategies for cloud ERP implementations, leading to misaligned goals and missed opportunities. Sales, implementation, consulting, and support teams often struggle with alignment, with each team focusing on its own immediate priorities. This misalignment is part of a larger issue: The overall lack of alignment with customer goals and vision from the very beginning. Without clear communication and early collaboration, businesses risk costly delays and operational disruptions and ultimately fail to deliver long-term value. Cloud ERP transformations are now critical for businesses, offering real-time data insights, scalability, and continuous innovation. As a result, a more collaborative, industry-specific approach that delivers faster, more predictable results is essential for long-term success.

The problem with traditional ERP migrations
Traditional ERP projects often follow a predictable yet flawed path. Once the contract is signed, the sales team moves on, leaving the delivery team to pick up the project without sufficient understanding of the customer's challenges and business goals. Because no one from the implementation or customer success teams is engaged during these initial discussions, critical information is frequently lost in the handoff.

After the initial deployment, customer success and support typically engage only sporadically, often focusing on upsell opportunities rather than proactively ensuring long-term value. Furthermore, many businesses find themselves stuck in an extended stabilisation phase post-deployment, preventing them from leveraging the full potential of their ERP system. This fragmented, siloed approach leads to miscommunication, misalignment, and missed opportunities for sustained business success.

To avoid this, vendors must adopt an approach that ensures customers can move beyond stabilisation quickly, with clear strategies for optimising and evolving their systems to meet changing business demands.

Finally, many customers struggle to access the deep industry-specific knowledge needed to tailor their cloud ERP systems effectively. Without this expertise, companies often face misaligned solutions that fail to address their unique challenges, leading to delays, increased costs, and missed opportunities for long-term value.

These challenges often lead to the following negative consequences:

• Siloed teams and processes: Without collaboration between sales, delivery, success, and support, teams fail to align on long-term success.
• Generic, non-industry-specific solutions: Many ERP solutions require extensive customization, which adds risk, time, and cost to the project.
• Short-term focus: While deal closure is important, prioritising immediate wins often undermines continuity and long-term value for both clients and vendors.
• Operational disruption and budget overruns: Miscommunication and lack of transparency often result in delayed timelines, inflated budgets, unwelcome surprises, and unrealized goals.
• Underestimated total cost of ownership (TCO): Many businesses face unplanned costs due to the need for additional staffing and support to manage and maintain ERP systems.
• Reactive support: Traditional ERP support is often reactive, waiting for problems to arise instead of pre-empting issues before they become costly.

According to McKinsey, 75% of cloud migration projects go over budget, and 38% are behind schedule.¹ In an industry where misaligned goals and siloed operations persist, the need for change is clear.

A new approach: Reimagining cloud ERP transformations
To truly transform cloud ERP migrations, companies need to adopt a model that aligns all stakeholders from the start, fosters continuous engagement throughout, and proactively addresses potential issues before they arise.

Here's what an ideal approach would look like:

1. Breaking down silos: Ensure that sales, implementation, and customer success teams are aligned from the beginning. Such collaboration would prevent miscommunication and handoff issues that often derail traditional implementations. By maintaining a unified focus, teams can work together to achieve long-term goals, rather than just short-term wins.
2. Preconfigured, industry-specific solutions: Leverage preconfigured solutions and business processes tailored to specific industries. Prioritising standardised implementations over excessive customisations reduces the complexity, risk, and time required for deployment. These solutions incorporate industry best practices from the outset, ensuring the ERP system is optimised for the specific needs and challenges of each industry. This approach accelerates deployment, fosters quicker adoption, and delivers a faster return on investment (ROI).
3. Holistic, continuous engagement: Maintain an ongoing dialogue with customers throughout the entire ERP lifecycle. This type of engagement methodology would begin even before the contract is signed and continue long after deployment. By staying connected, vendors can better adapt to evolving customer needs, ensuring that the solution effectively meets its initial goals—while also remaining relevant and effective over time. Such an approach would allow for continuous feedback loops, where insights gained during each phase are fed back into the process to improve future stages.
4. Proactive problem solving: Shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset. Anticipating issues before they occur allows teams to address potential problems early, minimising disruptions and keeping projects on track. This proactive stance includes regular risk assessments, scenario planning, and the use of predictive analytics to identify and mitigate potential challenges.
5. Incremental, non-disruptive innovation: Cloud ERP transformations should evolve at the customer's pace, ensuring that changes are incremental and non-disruptive. Innovation should go hand in hand with the deployment and optimization of core system capabilities, allowing businesses to adopt advancements gradually without overwhelming their operations. This balanced approach also allows businesses to customise and build on the platform to innovate in ways that provide a unique competitive edge.
6. Continuous improvement beyond the initial launch: Simply moving to the cloud is not the end goal. Continuous improvement and ongoing innovation are essential to ensuring long-term success. A customer's cloud ERP system should be flexible enough to adapt to their evolving business needs, allowing for ongoing optimisation and enhancements that drive further value over time.
7. Consistent access to expertise: Ensure customers have ongoing access to the knowledge and expertise needed throughout the entire ERP lifecycle. Consistent support helps guide businesses through each phase of the implementation, adoption, and optimisation process, ensuring that they fully realise the value of their investment and avoid gaps in support or information.

Conclusion: Building for long-term success
Cloud ERP transformations are more than just a move to the cloud—they are a long-term journey toward continuous improvement and innovation.

By focusing on readiness, prescriptive deployment, and ongoing innovation adoption, customers can achieve not only their immediate goals but also sustainable, long-term success. A holistic approach ensures that businesses not only reach the cloud but continue to evolve, optimise, and thrive as they grow.