Go-live is what the whole implementation project team works for. During the whole implementation project, you will hear the term go-live again and again. Its literal meaning is when something becomes live. In the enterprise resource planning (ERP) world, it means that the production environment is available to end users so that they can perform day-to-day business processes.

Go-live is one of the last events that need to be executed as part of the ERP implementation project. It is the end result of the ERP implementation project. It is exciting; however, it is also the most hectic and intense period in the entire ERP project and deserves a fair amount of planning and attention to go smoother. So far, the project implementation team has been working extremely hard designing, developing, testing, and training, and a lot of time and money has been put into the project. A successful go-live can make all that hard work and investment worth it and smoothen the adoption of the new ERP system.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Learning about the production environment and responsibilities
• Understanding go-live activities 
• Exploring the organization's readiness to go live
• Understanding go-live planning and execution
• Learning about post go-live support

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to plan for go-live and make a successful go-live. You will have also learned how you can support a production environment, since taking a project to the go-live state is a major milestone. Keeping it up and running is equally important.