|
As a Consultant with 21 years experience I was faced with a challenging task of handling the entire project life cycle with minimal resources. The previous history part is that our company had a trademark ERP which was suitable for gulf conditions but for Indian conditions there were many components like one very important was tax because in gulf there is no tax. So I had to take a tour of the 5 process groups in project management which are Initiation, Planning, execution, Monitor and Control, Project Closure.
In Initiation as a consultant I started from requirement gathering from the customer where we had installed the basic trademark ERP at the customer site with all masters. What was required was to do a Gap & Fit analysis to find the gaps in the system as against the customer requirement. Our ERP had modules like General Ledger , Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Stock & Inventory, Personnel and Payroll , Sales , Purchase and Production. All these modules had to be customized which had to be done in Microsoft Technologies. During the Gap & Fit analysis I also trained the operators on the trademark ERP so that in the later stages of implementation the product would go live successfully and My interaction with the stake holder revealed that were gaps in all the modules of the ERP which required extensive customization.
After the Gap & Fit requirement document was published by me during the period of interaction with the customer I took the sign of the document from the customer after freezing the requirement. After this phase I moved into the second process group that is planning, after hiring the minimal resources for the project the design phase of the project was initiated by me where a proper schedule and deadline for the project was created on MS Project 2013. In the design phase the database schema and architecture of the database was modified for customization purposes the specifications were given to the developers by me.
After the design was duly done we started the coding process which was done using Microsoft Technologies and each form design had to be created by me and given to the developers. After this process the Test Plan was prepared by me and the scripts created by developers were tested by me and attached remotely in the clients system so they could practice on the new modules which was developed on top of the base trademark ERP.
During the final stage of implementation I visited the client and started a parallel run with their existing legacy system that is entering all the transactions which are entered in the legacy system should also be entered in our Trademark ERP and comparing the important reports like Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Stock Report which got tallied and finally after this milestone I got the sign off from the client regarding closure of the project.
The Author (Suresh V. Menon) is a subject matter expert on ERP and has worked in various capacities as Project Manager, Test Manager, ERP Consultant and Implementation Manager he can be contacted at sureshmenonr1009@gmail.com for comments and queries.
