With the advent of various cloud technologies in the ERP space, gone are the days of year long implementation cycles, long negotiations with hardware vendors and a general inability of IT teams to respond quickly to ever changing demands from the business.
For businesses already on Oracle ERP, the movement to Cloud is an obvious next step. The advantages of moving to Cloud have been well documented so I wouldn’t go into these again.
In this article, I would like to talk about how customers can move to Oracle Sales Cloud in just 5 weeks with some clever planning and focusing on essentials. That’s is how we did it!
Internal IT Champions – The internal IT team needs to take a keen interest in understanding the sales business process as well as the new application. I talk a little bit about this in my earlier article – http://tinyurl.com/h64hx9w . Active participation from the internal IT team instead of being a passive by stander will shorten your implementation timeline significantly.
Tight Scope – We set out with a certain of set of features from Sales Cloud which were deemed necessary by the business user community. Although we showed them the new features available and possibilities for the future, we made sure we stuck to our scope and feature set diligently.
Day 1, Requirements Done – Throughout the vendor selection process, we made sure we gathered the information which would form the basis of the requirements. The intent from the beginning was to have the requirements document finished to the best of our knowledge by end of Day 1. This strategy gave the project much needed time for the rest of the steps.
Reporting is an on-going affair – We set clear expectations with our end users as well as management on reports. Based on our past experiences, we knew that reporting requirements usually evolve as business understands the new application better.
Doing these things and constantly keeping our end user and management teams aware of our progress made it possible for us to Go Live with Oracle Sales Cloud within 5 weeks.
