Once the system is stable enough, it is time to review the opportunities for taking the business to the next level. The initial implementation is phase one of the project and you may not see the direct ROI by just going live. Many times, the initial impetus of a new ERP system is risk avoidance of using a non-supported platform. Many business process improvement initiatives would have to be taken up once you have the foundation in place, and these would result in true ROI from the Dynamics AX project.
A PIR is useful for the following reasons:
- It identifies the unused potential of your Dynamics AX investments
- It helps in ascertaining what could be (or could have been) done better
- It helps in discover training opportunities
- PIR is important for the analysis of the business pain points, such as implementation issue, product gap, or process issues
- It provides opportunities for performance improvements
- PIR gets the business team re-engaged
- With PIR, you can build a backlog that would help redefine your roadmap: short term and long term
- You can prepare a long-term roadmap for what's coming (The next version that may have already been released or any structural/foundational changes that may need to be considered in the next upgrade)
The following is a list of some key factors that need to be considered for a successful PIR:
- Business involvement is crucial.
- Reviewing everything could be expensive; you need to clearly define the scope and stay laser-focused.
- An independent group to provide an unbiased opinion.
- Team of experts who can foresee the big picture and who have cross-functional knowledge.
- Experts who can understand/speak business and the technical language to get to the bottom of issues, analyze them, and make actionable recommendations. Some industry knowledge is extremely important.
- Keep the emotions, history, and personal attacks out of it. Getting into history and finger-pointing does not help. The goal should be to get to a better state.
To ensure a successful PIR, make the following preparations:
- Collect the project documentation. The following is a list of a few key documents:
- Business process flows
- Functional and technical architecture, all other systems
- Customizations list and specs
- Requirements, Fit/Gap documents
- Training documents
- Issue list
- Engage all the business groups and IT, and have them come up with the top 5-10 pain points. Provide templates and gather information.
- Arrange for access to the environments (with a relatively recent production data).
- Install the required tools for tracing.
- Hold kickoff with business and IT. Define and clarify goals, expectations, and so on.
The following are some examples of pain points that you would see as part of the process:
- The inventory does not tie to the general ledger
- Can't explain changes in the margin with inventory close
- Our FIFO/weighted average is different from Dynamics AX
- As-of-date inventory reports do not work
- The returns process is too cumbersome
- I am flying blind; I don't have reports to run the business
- Month-end closing takes a long time
- Too many journal entries to post to classify the transactions that were not posted with the correct financial dimensions
- Reconciliation of the sub ledger and the GL is time consuming
- Need as-of-date AR reports
- The sales orders are too hard to unwind after a certain stage
- Can't understand the results of master planning
- Planning takes a long time to run
- Batch processes take too long to run; sometimes, nightly batches do not finish in time
- Performance of the sales order screen is poor
- Too many clicks in the collections module; need to see all the information in one view
- Developers often break production
The following diagram shows how the Business Pain points are centered with the combination of Unused Dynamics AX potential, Customizations and workarounds,and the noise created by the ISV add-on
The following diagram is a summary of the key challenges from the initial implementation, defined on the basis of the informati on gathered from the business teams:
Dynamics AX has a rich functionality, but you may not have been exposed to all the features that can be helpful for your business. You would be overwhelmed to see how much more can be achieved on your current platform itself. The following image shows the low-hanging fruits, which can mostly be achieved through training:
There can be improvement opportunities in the business processes or the system processes. Dynamics AX is very flexible and provides multiple ways of configuring the system to meet the requirements. You can review whether there can be better ways to utilize the system to meet your business process requirements, as shown in the following table data:
It is very likely that by the time you go live and are ready for the post implementation review assessment, Microsoft may have already released the next major version of the product (like R2 and R3 of the same or the potential next version). It is good to know about the new features that are available in the product that can be utilized in the future (in some cases, Microsoft also releases backward portability options). This exercise is helpful in aligning your roadmap with the product roadmap to ensure that you don't build something (or buy another product) that Microsoft has already added, or is in the process of adding, to the next release:
