S4E19 | How to Run an ERP Discovery Week That Actually Works

Peter Nicholson (00:00)
And welcome back to the ABCs of ERP and Beyond, the show that looks at ERP from three different seats. I'm Pete and joined as always by Narab Shah, who brings the implementation partners' view, and Emily Browning, who keeps us honest on process, projects, and the people that have to make all of this work. And this week the demos are over, sales pictures have been done, and you've now chosen your ERP, signed that contract.

And now there's a calendar invite and it just says discovery or discovery week. And this typically is where the business starts having to explain how they actually operate in order to start configuring this new system. And it can sound straightforward, but oftentimes it isn't. So today we are looking at what should happen in the run-up before this discovery phase, during it, and after discovery. Who needs to be in the room?

and how to navigate this critical early stage of an ERP

Nirav Shah (00:56)
.

Peter Nicholson (00:57)
implementation. So with that, welcome both. Let's get it straight

into it.

so Discovery Week or the Discovery Phase. Now we've had a few episodes where we talked about discovery and discovering solutions out there and how to start finding out what might be a good fit for you from a software, you know, platform point of view, and what kind of aspects of a partner makes a good partner. So here we are talking about discovery again. So

What

do we actually mean when we mean discovery week Emily, if if we go from a business point of view, first of all, we've chosen the ERP. We know we're gonna go on on Acumatica or B C and we're now planning for a discovery week. What should we expect to do during this?

Emily Browning (01:40)
Yeah, I think at first you're right that there are there are kind of multiple phases of your project that kind of end up being get a c getting called discovery. And I've definitely had to define this part of it to kind of avoid confusion when having having discussions within the business. But yes, when you start discovery week, you've chosen your vendor, you've chosen your ERP, and this is essentially the kickoff of the project. You've probably got your financial approval all done by now.

You might not, you might do Discovery Week first to get a really detailed quote, but you don't necessarily need that if you've got a vendor that really knows what they're doing. so what would you expect from a Discovery Week? This is when your vendor comes in, either physically or remotely. I personally think physically, if you can, is the way to go. and they're really going to start asking questions about your processes, finding out exactly how you currently do things.

either shadowing some of the people that work in your business or you're, you know, bringing everybody in the room to step through your processes. And what the Narav can speak more to this, but what the vendor is doing is then, mapping your processes into the ERP that you've chosen and finding out where do your processes not quite fit, or where do we have more questions? Where might the configuration need to leave need to be a little bit different.

If there are going to be any customizations, this is definitely where you want them to find it. essentially, this is where all of your requirements are laid out. I I personally don't think I've done a very good discovery if a whole bunch of new requirements come up later throughout the project. I think you can guarantee there'll be some, but for the most part, you should be able to pick up everything that you need in this week because that is

Nirav Shah (03:22)
Thank

Emily Browning (03:22)
the purpose of it.

so for me, one of the most important things to have a really good discovery week is making sure that the right people are in the room and it's probably more people than you think need to be there. I quite often see that the, you know, you bring in just the work stream owners or the department heads, the people you've chosen as your subject matter experts, but bring in more, bring in more people from that department. This is the time to get them all in because

probably one of them does some particular task once a week, once a month, and the others may not be particularly aware of that. So just get them all in the room and talk about those processes together.

Peter Nicholson (03:59)
Before we flip over to the partner side, a couple of questions on the people in the room, I guess, because oftentimes when you have everyone in the room, you've got a mixture of people, boots on the ground, closest to the work, in the same room as senior management. And

Someone has to be the referee sometimes between that, because oftentimes you can get senior management describe the process they think happens. And we've spoken about this before when these people that are distant from the actual day-to-day processes, they haven't got a clue what actually needs to happen and the pain points and the frustrations with the current system. So are there any tips, I guess, on how you let people air genuine frustrations?

but also how do you stop the loudest person or the most senior person from just turning this into, you know, what they what they want?

Emily Browning (04:49)
Mm-hmm. And I don't think I'm really bringing in senior management to these sessions or not not as a big collective. I I would

Nirav Shah (04:56)
Okay.

Emily Browning (04:56)
I would hope that my vendor is setting up discovery sessions by, you know, by a particular process for a particular department. Because I I don't think, I certainly have never seen it. You wouldn't come in and do, you know, let's do an order to cash session. It would be more let's take a look at finance. Now let's take a look at supply chain.

Now let's take a look at order entry. It would be quite intentional. And therefore, I think you can keep quite a concentrated group of people who are the ones that really work on those processes and therefore should feel comfortable. I mean, that's a good reason. The g making them feel that they can air out the frustrations that they have. don't put those departments together so that they can complain about each other a little bit, because I'm sure they do have complaints.

going both ways. I'm sure the same things, you know, one thing might annoy your order entry team, the and the same thing annoys the finance team as well. So I've usually seen it quite intentionally done by department. But I'm sure that's not the only way. I would be curious to know if either of you have experienced otherwise. But I would that's kind of how I try

to avoid that problem of people feeling like they can't.

they can't say what they want to say, or just having some loud, loud person take over the whole thing.

Nirav Shah (06:12)
Yeah, I think for me, from a partner standpoint is the decision makers. But I think there needs to be context first and then decision makers come in and make the final decisions on how we're going to be configuring the system and what is phase one look like and what is phase two look like, right? Discovery to me, there's a sales aspect to this upfront early on. And when you have an AE, an account executive or somebody that's engaged,

with the prospect at that point and they're asking questions, right? Maybe even the solution engineer gets involved and they're asking questions, but those questions are really more directed towards, we have a deal here? Do we have a general good fit, right? It's not a discovery that you would kind of get after you sign contracts and you start the implementation. So that sales discovery is not the end all be all. And I think sometimes they're

becomes a little bit of a confusion upfront because I think prospects want a full discovery. Partners want a, we have a deal here discovery? And if there's too many gaps that we're noticing right away, then, you know, it's not a good ERP fit or whichever ERP you're looking at. But when you sell the deal, right, now you're looking at a true functional discovery. And I always feel, and I kind of,

you know, tell our customers is let's get as many people as we can in a room for a kickoff discovery. And then we'll break into different sessions, right? Could be by department. And there we want as many people in the department as possible. And this is where I love when people just spitball. Just spitball and talk about whatever.

whatever's on top of mind, whatever's bothering you, what you like about your current process, what you don't like about your current process, and just there's really nothing that's off the table here. And then you document and you talk about all these things at the end of the day. And then after that session is done, a couple of days later, you start kind of as a partner, you start dissecting, OK, well, how do we kind of strategize and put some of these

things that we talked about together into a functional business process. How do we do this in an ERP? Can we do it in the ERP? And come up with what I call strategies and business processes and talk to the key users, the people that actually are going to make managers, are going to make a decision on how that department is going to work. And go through what we've talked about, what we've learned from the business, and get decisions.

Completed, saying, OK, these are your options. This is the gap. And don't keep it open-ended. I think a lot of ERP partners say, yeah, the system could do so much. It could do this. It could do that. But they don't really clearly state to the customer that this will be a customization. Instead

Emily Browning (08:59)
No.

Nirav Shah (09:00)
of saying, yeah, it could do it. Yeah, ERP could do anything you want. But.

If

you're not upfront saying this is a customization, you're leading the customer down a wrong path, right? And that's not the purpose of the discovery. Just to say you could do everything. The purpose of discovery is to say that the system has some gaps in it based on the way you're doing things right now. If that's what you want to do it. And that will be a customization or you could take the system out of the box. That has to be discussed like upfront and early to set the expectation. Cause if a discovery is done well, that

is like the springboard to all the momentum and all the proper conversations, like proper decisions that you made, customization, no customization, leading into the implementation. If a partner is afraid to have that conversation and just taking the discovery for face value, like, okay, thank you for telling me everything you're doing, and we're gonna try to do everything in the ERP system when you start the training. That to me is gonna be a failed implementation.

You have to upfront make it known what you could do, what you can't do as part of process. Because look, at the end of the day, this is generic ERP software. You're buying something out of the box. You're buying something off the shelf. The publisher has some sort of background maybe in that industry or whatnot. But you're not getting something that's going to be exact, ready to go for you from a best fit perspective.

So the discovery is to set the expectation of what the system could do and can't do based on everything that you've heard. Having that hard conversation with the customer, right? And then that should be the guiding light, the Northern Star, if you will, to what a successful project looks like. So kind of coming back to what you're saying, Peter, I think you need to have everybody in the room initially, okay? Everyone that's going to touch the system in some capacity. Start spitballing everything you can.

Then present ideas and what you envision and how that business model will be processed. Have hard conversations on what's a customization, what's not a customization. And then document that and integrate that into your implementation plan, your key user training. Specific scenarios actually, even to that level. A lot of partners, they'll come out of a discovery and all they're right there, sales order training. We're gonna have that.

for three hours. But what does that really tell you? What about all that work you did in the discovery? What type of sales orders are you going to work on? What type of scenarios? What type of exceptions? That discovery output should be really everything that you're going to be testing in training. It should

Peter Nicholson (11:26)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (11:27)
be that detailed, not just say do sales orders, because you lose sight of everything you discussed.

And if a partner's not giving you that detail, I would be very wary on, know, did you even complete a proper discovery upfront and what was really documented?

Emily Browning (11:40)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (11:41)
When you when you're hearing some of this stuff, what what tells you whether it is a customization or a configuration? I th I can think of four off the top of my head, four categories it could be. It could be we just configure the system for you, you know, check boxes and settings and preferences. Or

Nirav Shah (11:57)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (11:58)
it could be a genuine customization, or it could just be training, right? You know, this is bog standard stuff, every company does this, we just need to teach you how to do it.

or it could be a business process change, which I

Nirav Shah (12:09)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (12:09)
guess could be, you know, you could go down either the customization route or the business has to change to fit a standard process. But what tells you of those four categories? What have you got to hear that goes, Nope, that can only be done by customization?

Nirav Shah (12:24)
Yeah,

I think a lot of it is maybe regulatory compliance that a customer specifically has that doesn't fully come out of the box in any ERP system unless it's very industry specific. Integration with third parties pretty quickly, like, hey, I need to go ahead and move these invoices into this system. currently we do it.

We key it in, but we would like to go ahead and maybe write an API because there's no current integration out there potentially. And just people that are resistant to change. They're like, nope, I need this outside the system, and this is the way I do it. And then how do get that back into the system and make it more real time? Then you have to make a decision, OK, do we just do this for right now for this one user because it's going to make this person happy at the end of the day.

So those are kind of the really three things to me and where it comes down with, and when you customize or what you try to use out of the box. But these are digital transformations.

As much as companies say that we want to use a system vanilla, they never use a system vanilla. There's so many like, I think strong opinions during an implementation that you if you don't nip it right away, and like everybody know that we're not doing customizations, we're going to use this out of the box. Once you start doing one customization that opens up a whole can of worms to start customizing, customizing, customizing, customizing.

And next thing you know, you're customizing a new system to look like just like a previous system.

Peter Nicholson (13:51)
How hard do you

think you should have to push that though? Is it down to you to

push that or would you rather have hope that the stakeholder would fight that battle internally?

Nirav Shah (13:59)
That's always the goal. That's always the goal to have the stakeholder fight that battle for you. As a partner, we're always in a tricky spot. We try to keep smiles on people's faces, right? When we walk in the door and try to do training, we don't want people to fight us per se, you know, on doing an implementation. We're doing this for a better of their job responsibility and their business. But we sometimes have to be bad guys and say,

Guys, I don't think you should do this customization because you just have a couple extra clicks like doing this, this, and the other, and you get the same output. And as long as we documented that we've given them an alternative process, but they still chose the customization route, that's up to them at that point. We can't prevent that. If they want it, they want it. But sometimes, once you present the customization quote,

That immediately deters them like, whoa, OK, we're not going to spend 16 hours for this customization right now. We'll just do what's available out of the box, right? Versus some customers are like, no, that's fine. 16 hours, yeah, we just need this one report and we need it, right? Which maybe could be handled by a GI in Acumatica, for example, right? You don't even have to create a report. But the person, I know, I need to hit this button. I need to create a report, right? Blah, blah, blah, whatever that case is, and they're willing to pay for it. We have to,

Peter Nicholson (15:09)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (15:09)
partners, give them options at the end of the day.

as much as we try to push, saying you don't have to really do this. Some customers just don't want to listen. It's just a fact of the matter. But we do. As a partner, I know we do it on our side. We try to stick to vanilla as much as possible. It makes a lot of things easier at the end of the day. And if that's known upfront in the discovery that we're going to try to keep things vanilla, the conversations start becoming a little bit more productive, saying, guys, yeah, you do this, but...

Just because you've been doing it for the last five years or seven years or you inherited this spreadsheet because your predecessor did this and really don't know whether that's spreadsheet that's correct or not correct, right? Why don't you try this other thing at the end of the day that's available out of the box, right? Then we stick to out of the box. But the key when it comes down to discovery is to understand that, understand knowing where you could push, saying we want to customize, don't want to customize versus we have to customize at the end of the day.

Emily Browning (16:04)
Let's talk about managing that on the customer side then, because there are ways going in as project managing that this can be handled really well. but there's definitely, definitely some skill and planning ahead, ahead in that. And I think it's really

Nirav Shah (16:17)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (16:17)
important. so one of the things I would share first with my business, my users, is you know, okay, why why are we saying we want to go vanilla, we want to go standard.

And I wouldn't say it's even necessarily about the implementation cost because we're in discovery, you know, we're understanding it. We can we can account for it, we can plan it in. but it costs costs us later, right? It makes our upgrades harder, they take longer, we might not be able to do them. We're going to have to spend more money to keep that upgrade working. We're going to have to invest in more testing every time we do an upgrade because we have all of this stuff that isn't standard. so that's usually.

You know, if you're working with smart people, they're normally going to understand that. And it kind of speaks to them: look, it's going to be easier in the future if we don't heavily customize this. and another thing I always do in Discovery is give my vendor the direction, don't talk about customizations with my users. talk

Nirav Shah (17:14)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (17:14)
about the process, understand what they need.

Nirav Shah (17:17)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (17:17)
really

get into it, but don't talk to them about the solution. Talk to me about the solution. or me and my IT team, my, you know, my sort of c very core project management team. And let's look at what our what our options are. because first of all, I can then look at do we really need this? And if the answer is somebody would just prefer it, no, we definitely don't need it in that case. For me, it's

Is there a compliance reason that we need this? Often there is. Or is there a customer reason? Are we going to lose some big account? Is there something in the business that we do? And that is the reason we have particular customers or something. Sometimes you do need, you know, if half of your revenue comes from one customer, sure, you're probably going to have to bend to make them happy. But I I try to always.

Go at it with that lens. Do we really need it just for those two reasons? And if we do, then what can that look like? What are our options? If you if we had, let's say, what does it look like if you if you customize us exactly what we're saying we need? and then let's let's brainstorm, let's think about what else can we do? What other options do we have? Is there a

you know, a lesser customization? Is there some kind of mix of configuration and customization that we can do? Does this complex process we're telling you about, does it really need to fully be that way? Or can we simplify some of it so that we don't need all of that anymore? You can you can set you can set that tone on the business side and you definitely should. I have I am aware of many ERP migrations that have gone

wrong, hugely over budget, hugely over time, because we let users talk about customizations

Nirav Shah (18:59)
Thank

Emily Browning (19:01)
with the vendor.

And some

Nirav Shah (19:02)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (19:03)
vendors are just saying, Yeah, we can do that. Of course you can. You can develop anything. but it's not a good idea.

Nirav Shah (19:06)
Yeah, and

that's kind of what I was saying is some partners, some ERP partners out there aren't very upfront in saying this is a customization versus not a customization during the discovery. And then that discovery becomes not as productive, which then leads to a very incomplete training plan. The discovery sets the tone for the rest of the project at the end of the day. And if

Emily Browning (19:30)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (19:31)
that discovery is handled poorly,

you know, it's going to miss a lot of things in the training. So it's, you know, I can't stress enough when you do the discovery. It's take your time, even if it's you schedule for a week and you need two weeks, that's fine. That's going to save you a lot of time in the long run, right? In terms of headaches and the ERP project, understanding what the proper scope is. So take an extra week. I think it's totally reasonable when it comes to a discovery because

It's, you know, and I'm also a proponent. Let me just say, by the way, during a discovery, show software, show software. It's fine. Right. You know, as a partner, sometimes you get scared that showing the software too quickly because it's to confuse people or that you might not be ready. But during the discovery, you should be ready as a partner, because as you're going through all these conversations, it's OK. Pop something up on the screen.

show them how you quickly go ahead and do a shipment, right? Show them how you quickly do something in the ERP, because that adds additional context to the discovery on what you can and cannot do in the ERP implementation. So I am,

Peter Nicholson (20:34)
I cannot ru I cannot count

how many times that that actually curbed a lot of endless conversations that could have happened. When you've got someone in the room that's complaining about, well, our system, you can't do this, that, and you know, I'm I

Nirav Shah (20:47)
Yep.

Peter Nicholson (20:47)
really care about this and I have to be able to do this. And as they're just rabbiting on about this, the partners pulling up Acumatica and like hovering their pointer around this button that's like this one click solution that does everything they're moaning about.

Nirav Shah (21:00)
Exactly,

Peter Nicholson (21:01)
And it's kind of end of conversation. So yep, does it, let's move on. And

Emily Browning (21:01)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (21:05)
obviously the you know, the I hope that the partners sitting there are not just kind of dismissing it, but at least saying, right, some training on you know how Acumatica handles that particular process. And it goes into that training bucket, not into you know any other bucket.

Nirav Shah (21:17)
Right. Yep.

Peter Nicholson (21:18)
I want to just talk about Discovery Week also. If we say it's Discovery Week, right, maybe we can run through a quick like Monday to Friday, what tends to happen early on in the week.

And

what needs to have happened by Friday to say, right, tick, we're okay on discovery.

Nirav Shah (21:32)
Yep.

Peter Nicholson (21:33)
but before that, I think also, and I think it's some of the things that you were saying earlier, around kind of reconfirming to the business why you're doing this, right? Why you're going into a new ERP.

yeah, I was thinking about this about, you know, people going in and going, well, we need this customized and we need that customized. I think if you actually before Monday have a bit of a team get together, say on the Friday afternoon, go, right, let's just remember why we're doing this. Right. We w we discussed, you know, the pain points and whatever whatever the main reason is that you're actually

wanting to move on from your current your current system or your current business processes. I think it's really key to be able to say to the business, this is what's in scope, this is what's out of scope. I think hopefully that would maybe avoid some of those excited people

Nirav Shah (22:22)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (22:23)
about customizations. And

Nirav Shah (22:25)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (22:26)
say, you know, the point of the Discovery Week is you know talk through end-to-end processes.

etcetera. But I think that might help the business ground themselves before Discovery Week. And the other thing I was thinking about also, I just had this picture in my mind earlier when we were talking about whether it should be done remotely or, you know, have the partner in the room. If you've got the partner in the room, they've flown over, there's a cost to that. I think Discovery Week is already a failed process if on Monday morning

You've got every one of the e every staff member in the room and you've got a whiteboard and it's blank. And the partner

Nirav Shah (23:02)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (23:03)
goes, Right, tell me what you do. Where should we start? I think if you're

Nirav Shah (23:06)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (23:06)
at that point, it's not gonna go very well and you're gonna waste a bunch of time. So I'm thinking about what we could do maybe before that week. So I don't know whether you Nora have got any kind of tips or things you ask customers, but I would like to be sending my partner

Copies of invoices. Maybe I have got some SOPs. I mean, I don't want to chuck a barrage at them, but at least some things

Nirav Shah (23:28)
Yep.

Peter Nicholson (23:29)
of like this is what our invoices are. This is how we do this. Here's a workflow for this. Or, you know, here's a a very important sales report that gets run every Monday morning for our meeting. At least to give them some kind of an idea

Nirav Shah (23:41)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (23:43)
of okay, these guys really see this as an important process. They really care about this or or this looks crazy.

it looks like we're gonna have to double down and pick away at this potential issue. is that something you'd flies or?

Nirav Shah (23:57)
Yeah, so lot. So usually we there's a handoff between sales and professional services or consulting and a lot of that information is most likely gathered during the sales cycle, right? Because when we're doing demos, we're trying to do it with the customers data in it, trying to figure out what are some of the most important reports that they're running? You know, what are equivalent reports in Acumatica? What is a general business process flow? So, for example, for us, what we do is during the sales cycle, we do our initial discovery, which is like

maybe like an hour, maybe two hour discovery, but we then try to provide a workflow document. So we'll try to open up a business process, whatever solution we use Miro on our side, and we will literally go ahead and sketch out what their proposed business processes, from order entry all the way to cash, both on the AR and AP side and all the different type of ordering that they do. So we try to do that and try to get them to...

to understand or visually see we understand their business. And then we ask for data, give us some of your information that will be relevant to you during the demo. That's really the extent of the sales cycle. Assuming all goes well, they actually go ahead and agree that this is the right software for them, then we do a transition from sales to professional services. So we're trying to do a dump of what our sales discovery was, what the demo.

was, what we did in the demo, what was the workflow that we proposed to them, and what is phase one, what is phase two. And then we send all that over to our consultant, and then they use that as a basis for the discovery. So they're not coming in blind. They're not coming in like, don't know what this company does, or what we showed them, or what we sold to them as phase one. That's just a starting point, we tell our customers, is that we just scratched the surface during the sales cycle.

If as long as we're a good 80, 90 % fit, the 10%, which is probably the most important, the last mile of information that we're going to gather during the discovery is what's going to make or break the project. So we try to be very clear up that upfront. So we just take that information in the sales cycle and we add to our full consulting discovery that we do for a week or two, whatever that looks like.

Peter Nicholson (26:07)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (26:07)
This

is what I would want to see. if they if they showed up on Monday morning, looked at me and my team and said, So where shall we start? I would be thinking, I I think maybe I've s chosen the wrong people here then. If they, you know, if they don't already

Nirav Shah (26:20)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (26:21)
have a plan for this week, I do agree that we should prepare kind of based on what I said earlier around, you know, what are our complexities that we are forced into because of a customer need, because of compliance.

It's great

Nirav Shah (26:34)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (26:34)
to have an internal understanding of those things, map those out, even if it's just for the purposes of you guys understanding, as in us in the business, understanding from end to end what what is this process really like? We know it's kind of painful or this special weird thing that we do. but do we fully understand it? That that's worth investing a bit of time in mapping out for everything

Nirav Shah (26:56)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (26:56)
else. I

Personally don't want to have to map it out because I think that's there's a lot of value in the vendor doing that. That's them showing us that they understand. and I've I've seen so much value in ERP projects when, you know, when the vendor really demonstrates they truly understand it. You know, when someone in production or the warehouse says, you know, we need it to work this way, and the vendor goes, but what about this situation that you have? You know, in Discovery Week, we saw that you do this thing. How would this work then?

That's so, so valuable. and I don't think they're gonna get that if I bombard them with a bunch of stuff. I also think some vendors might feel then that you're kind

Nirav Shah (27:34)
Thank

Emily Browning (27:35)
of telling them this is how we want you to run Discovery Week. And if I've chosen a good vendor, I'm quite happy to follow however they do it, whatever is their process. I think if we sort of force force them to work in a particular way, then we're not going to get their best.

As long as we chose a

Nirav Shah (27:51)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (27:51)
good vendor.

Nirav Shah (27:52)
Yeah. Yeah. One thing I just want to add and discovery week, if you're doing a warehousing project at the same time, do the discovery in the warehouse floor. Right. It makes

Emily Browning (28:01)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (28:02)
a lot of sense to walk the floor with the team, jot down notes. What do they do good? What do they do bad? What do they want to improve on? And visually seeing something gets you into some deeper conversations.

with each other during the discovery from a warehousing standpoint, where you could come up with better process suggestions when it comes to the ERP instead of doing it in a boardroom or like in a conference room or something like that, right? I think some of the information could be lost in translation, doing it at the point in time where

Peter Nicholson (28:31)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (28:32)
you are actually, you have the ability to witness and see how they do things makes a world of a difference during your discovery.

Peter Nicholson (28:41)
I

think sometimes you can catch those critical failures that don't really get spoken about in the room as well. You know, you could easily be walking

Nirav Shah (28:47)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (28:48)
past the warehouse office and see some kind of customized screen or some Excel report and all it takes is the partner to go, What's that?

Nirav Shah (28:53)
Mm-hmm Yep, mm-hmm, right

Peter Nicholson (28:58)
that's a report that we have to manually kind of maintain for partial shipments. What

Nirav Shah (29:03)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (29:03)
do you mean by that?

Emily Browning (29:03)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (29:05)
well, you know, custom service, they don't have any visibility when we've part shipped and we need to remember that we still have, you know, a balance that still needs to be sent out. So we manually type in to this Excel spreadsheet. We're like, Well, okay, guys, right, we need some training around how

Nirav Shah (29:18)
Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (29:18)
Acumatica does partial shipments. You know, that's all it takes. And

Nirav Shah (29:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (29:22)
you don't get that. You miss you can miss those opportunities if you'd haven't physically walked around the premises and seen those kind of things. Yeah.

Nirav Shah (29:29)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

For sure. Like, where are you putting all your pick tickets after you finish? Right? You can visually see that. You know, where are you actually throwing the scrap after you're completed with the production order? Right? Because what you could do electronically, if it doesn't match up with what you do physically, right, the process is going to be hard to follow. So a lot of that stuff just needs to kind of be seen to make the right decision.

Peter Nicholson (29:51)
Or we've seen it with I've seen it with piles of paperwork. W what's that pile of paperwork? we wait until the end of the shift and then we scan each page one by one to the accounts team so they can invoice the customer. What? Like all

Nirav Shah (30:03)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (30:05)
of that goes away. That's not customization,

Emily Browning (30:06)
So

Peter Nicholson (30:07)
that's not configuration.

Nirav Shah (30:07)
All

Peter Nicholson (30:09)
That's just well, d you just need a modern ERP that does that. And

Nirav Shah (30:13)
Just need a mod on the RP. Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (30:15)
and I I'm I always think of

you

know, a lot of it comes back to visibility of what's going on in the business. Because we know an ERP is not like a centralized piece of software. It's a connected system. Right. You have

Nirav Shah (30:28)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (30:28)
different modules. You have a warehousing module, you have AP, AR, sales, etc. etc. Now they are connected. The beauty of that is visibility of data and being able to move on from, you know, one

point in the process to the next. And I think a lot

Nirav Shah (30:43)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (30:44)
of companies, even on the old ERP, are in that position where they have the big spike with all of the pick tickets and they have to, you know, im invoice them or someone has to run them upstairs to the back office for invoicing. A lot of that does go away, but it needs to be discovered in this discovery week, right? and the other

Nirav Shah (31:01)
Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (31:03)
thing I would say, I'm thinking about

Again, going back to who should be in the room. Hopefully the business does have that subject matter expert, that person that seems to know everything. You know, they might work in one department, but they know it deeply how another department works. And they also are a

Nirav Shah (31:20)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (31:20)
little bit technical and often are the person that fixes things in the ERP for other departments when it goes wrong. Right. Everyone's got that one

Nirav Shah (31:27)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (31:28)
whiz kid of a system.

that can fix those

Nirav Shah (31:30)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (31:30)
things. I think it's really key to have that person in the room because and I've seen it where you could be complaining, you know, moaning frustrations of your current system to the the partner and go, Well, you know, our system can't do this and it can't do that. And oftentimes through tribal knowledge, through turnover of staff, the current system does do all of that. I've had it. Like it

Nirav Shah (31:51)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (31:52)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (31:53)
does. You just don't know how to do it. You don't even know it exists in the system.

Nirav Shah (31:55)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (31:57)
So

I think it's important that you have someone I wouldn't say sensible or someone with common sense, but someone that knows. well, I will say that. But you need someone that's in there because

Nirav Shah (32:04)
huh.

Peter Nicholson (32:08)
the partner doesn't know at this stage. They don't know.

Nirav Shah (32:10)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (32:11)
you know, with someone, you know what it's like when someone starts going on and they've and they're moaning and they're moaning, they can make something sound huge. You need that sensible voice in the in the room from the business to go.

Yeah, but how often does that actually happen? And they'll be like, well, it happened last Thursday. Okay, cool. When was the last time before there? Can't remember. Last year, maybe? Well, okay, so let's move on.

It's really important to have someone in the room that can actually

objectively

measure those things because you're gonna have a room full of people that only will talk about their feelings and the subject and how it makes them feel when they have to do that. You need that's someone that's a little bit more grounded that can put it into data that the partner can work.

Emily Browning (32:51)
Even if it's just somebody who, you know, is familiar with that process, maybe they're in finance, but we're talking about, you know, something in supply chain procurement, it they the team talking about their own process may be thinking they're talking about some complexity that's really valuable to talk about because it is very complex and we've told them let's talk about some of these complexities, but it might need somebody else in the know to say, well, actually that only happens once a year, and you only spend

half an hour on it.

Peter Nicholson (33:20)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (33:21)
Maybe, maybe we don't,

Nirav Shah (33:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Emily Browning (33:22)
let's, let's not get into this. on on

Nirav Shah (33:24)
Exactly.

Emily Browning (33:25)
the same topic where, you know, where you say about bringing in these, you know, sort of knowledgeable, you know, we have some of these knowledgeable all-rounders, either, you know, across multiple departments or a particular department. Just one little call out there. It's, it's, I totally agree it's really important to have them there. But if we're mapping out a process, I always say don't give

That person the pen, because to a point they think they know it all. They're going to kind of talk us through everything and take us through a particular path that they're familiar with, and they're pretty much going to be correct. But some of that nuance, you know, the, you know, but then we, you know, then we scan in everything at the end of the shift. Maybe they're not quite so aware of that. And if you give the person who thinks they know it all the pen, they

Nirav Shah (34:07)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (34:08)
tend to.

take you through the process that they know and other people don't necessarily speak up then because they trust this person as well. They know this person knows what they're

Peter Nicholson (34:15)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (34:16)
talking about. They might doubt themselves in that moment and think, I shouldn't mention that because, you know, they didn't mention it. So it can't be relevant for now. I just won't talk about it.

Nirav Shah (34:23)
Right, right,

Peter Nicholson (34:25)
Or crap,

Nirav Shah (34:25)
right.

Peter Nicholson (34:26)
don't tell him that we forgot that we're supposed to be doing that every day. That

Emily Browning (34:29)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (34:31)
yeah, then they click this auto invoice button and then the rest of the team are like, Mm, do we?

Nirav Shah (34:35)
You know, yeah, do it. Yeah.

Emily Browning (34:35)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (34:36)
Yeah. When do we start doing that? Yeah.

Emily Browning (34:36)
Yeah. I also on on

the topic of talking about the complexities, something I run into quite a lot, and I think it's quite a big mistake, a big time waster, is really trying to get in and like reverse engineer some of the complexities. For me, the question is, why do we do this complex thing? If the answer is, we don't know, it's just always been that way.

Then I couldn't care less how it currently specifically works from beginning to end in the current ERP system that you have. I don't care about all of the ins and outs of that particular customization in that 15-year-old ERP. If you, if we can't, if the business now today can't give a reason, compliance customer for needing it to work that way, then let's not waste our time talking about

Nirav Shah (35:24)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (35:25)
it and just make sure, okay.

But what you need today with regards to that process, you know, here we open up Acumatica or whatever other ERP we're talking about and say, look, this is how that works. here, does that work for you? And if it does, great, then we've saved hours of of conversation reverse engineering things.

Peter Nicholson (35:43)
I'd also say if you have a team that can't explain the process without pulling up the ERP, they don't know the process. They know the buttons to click in their current system.

Nirav Shah (35:51)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (35:51)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (35:52)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (35:52)
So that's a bit of a red flag, I think.

Nirav Shah (35:54)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (35:54)
We've vastly run out of time, but let's just say day one. Well, before day one, we've done some prep work. Admittedly, some of it's gonna be in the sales cycle. day one of Discovery Week, we've got the team together, we've kind of said why we're here again. This is what we're gonna discuss. Day one, we get straight in, probably with finance, chart of accounts talks and all that kind of stuff. Days two, days three, mm, pushing into day four, we're probably going through each team.

finding out. We're going we're doing walk arounds from the round the factory, round the warehouse floor. Thursday we're starting to think about that list, I guess we talk talked about, you know, what could need further investigation. Because you're not going to cover everything. We should say that, right? You're probably not going to cover everything Discovery Week.

Nirav Shah (36:34)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (36:37)
let's just skip ahead and look at it from the other end.

what should exist by Friday for the partner and for the business?

Nirav Shah (36:43)
You should have basically your pilot scripts ready to go. Literally your prep.

Peter Nicholson (36:46)
What do you mean, pilot scripts?

Nirav Shah (36:48)
It's all the scenarios that we need to make sure get completed in the ERP.

That should be really now the focus point. Can we resolve all of these scenarios? You should come up with hundreds and hundreds of scenarios out of the discovery that we need to focus on train and complete our pilot over. Obviously, you're add to it. You could add to it as you go, but that list should be 80 to 90 % complete. If you had the right conversations, you had the right people in the room,

You're able to see their process. You showed them at Ematica, right? That now you have a structure in place on what this ERP project is designed to solve. Not just up in the air, you know, concepts floating around in the sky. It's actual business scenarios and processes that need to be solved to make a meaningful impact on the business.

by way of this ERP project.

Peter Nicholson (37:42)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (37:42)
I agree. I think that's that's essentially where the scope creep comes from. If you didn't have all the right people in the room and therefore you haven't essentially mapped out all of those things you're going to test, then when it comes to testing training, that's when they're gonna go, how do we do this? Well, we don't know, because you didn't bring it up in discovery. so

Nirav Shah (37:58)
Yep. Yeah, right.

Emily Browning (38:01)
yeah, I have to say I haven't actually ever done a discovery specifically with those pilot scripts in mind.

But you're totally right. That that is what you're doing. That's the reason

Nirav Shah (38:12)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (38:12)
that you need all of the right people there. That's why you need to go through all of this stuff.

Peter Nicholson (38:16)
Yeah, I I think that's key, putting those

putting those two thoughts together of coming away with hundreds of of these, and what Emily's saying about well, you that wasn't discussed. I think you need to be able to come away with the right level of detail. Right. You don't want

Nirav Shah (38:29)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (38:29)
to you don't want to have to walk away with man, we spent two hours around this thing at such a granular level that most of it dies anyway with the new system. But also you don't want to go away with this wishy washy like I'll be fine. we worry about RMAs later on. Like you need to find

Nirav Shah (38:40)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Nicholson (38:44)
that right level of detail. So it's not so much as

a question

Nirav Shah (38:46)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (38:47)
of the bigger the documentation the partner leaves the site with, the better it's gonna be has

Nirav Shah (38:51)
Right. Right.

Peter Nicholson (38:52)
everything been that needs to be surfaced and discussed actually been surfaced and discussed at the correct level of detail that we now know we now can start to work on some of those configurations. And hopefully those discussions will also set up everything else, right? This is kind of the baselines, the bedrock of the whole project that those will then turn into testing

scenarios for the teams when you're when you're at that stage of the project as well, right?

Nirav Shah (39:18)
Yeah, exactly. I think for a partner that avoids a lot of liability down the road is, you you have a document now that confirms everything you've discussed, the business process scenarios that need to be resolved, completed and tested before go live, where you could easily take that and add that as an appendix saying this is part of our training and our training schedule is built based off of this discovery and all these scenarios that we've gone through.

Right. Versus like, wait, you know, we didn't talk about drop shipping and we talked about it in discovery, but that was never added in the project plan training plan. Now we have this big gap, you know, right before it's supposed to go live. Like it just creates a ton of confusion. Right. If you, as a partner, if I'm able to deliver documentation of things that we've discussed, what the customer has approved that for me paints a stronger picture of what

you told me that you needed to be trained on because look, as a partner, you've been running your business for 50 years, 100 years, 30 years, whatever that is. I'm literally coming in and trying to learn your business in a week. I'm trying to learn your business in two weeks, right? And if I don't have a high level of confidence that you're telling me the right thing and I don't have that documented, this implementation could go down all these different rabbit holes.

Versus now you've told me, I've documented, you approved that documentation, that's rebuilding our training plan.

Emily Browning (40:36)
A question for Narav, kind of closing out the context of the discovery. We're talking a lot about training, but obviously between that comes, you know, design and develop. So as a as the vendor, what are you actually doing now? You're taking away all of all of this stuff.

Nirav Shah (40:51)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (40:52)
You go and design our solution. What what are the next steps on on your side?

Nirav Shah (40:55)
Yeah,

yeah, mean, definitely designed the project plan. I mean, the training plan, number one, which is separate than the implementation plan. The training plan is really detailed in terms of every scenario that we're training for each major module, right? Because we've identified that and we've confirmed that from the discovery. So that training plan should be in place. That should get approved by the customer or the project manager on their side.

to then start training on those specific things. Because the more concise and clear that training plan is, training, you're gonna spend less time on the training phase of it. Because now you're only training on the things you need to know. Instead of like going into all these different fields and all these different pages and all these things that you don't really need, they remember, we're getting a generic ERP system. So the more you could just focus in on exactly what you need to train on, on no nonsense training, what we try to call it.

because now we know your business well enough and you've confirmed that to us by way of the business process scenarios that you're telling us that we need to train on from the discovery, that really gets the implementation a lot more efficient than just keeping a lot of things open-ended. we have to go through every scenario in the sales module, which may not apply. Most of time it doesn't apply. So that really helps us minimize budget.

and scope creep. And if it does comes up, we'll know it because that wasn't documented early on. And that's an easy sell to the customer saying, hey, we never discussed this. This is the stuff you approved. It's going to be an additional hours for some additional training of things that we didn't discuss.

And everyone's happy

Peter Nicholson (42:24)
Think it's awesome.

Nirav Shah (42:25)
in that pet plan. Everyone is happy.

Peter Nicholson (42:27)
Think

it's also gonna help shape the next few weeks as well, because you're gonna walk from away from Discovery Week. I think the business and the partners are gonna both walk away from that going, Cool, this department's the easy one, right? There's very little we need to do. They're a skilled team, very vanilla processes, nothing wacky. We know that we can almost de resource it or at least deprioritize the amount of time that we had in our original plan.

for the configuration

Nirav Shah (42:52)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (42:53)
and training and stuff. however the discussions that we were having with you know finance holy shit isn't there a lot of compliance

Nirav Shah (42:59)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (43:00)
there we need to now you know spend an extra X number of hours or X number of days extra because of what we've now discovered. So I would like to see also quite early on from the partner a

re-edited plan based on what we've discovered because up until that point we've only been on the sales side sales pitches some higher level discussions of what we do and what we care about as a as as a business and obviously the whole project has been priced around that I would now start to expect to see a better plan whether we're using Smartsheet or Monday.com that starts to get changed

based on the conversations that they've left me with. You know, if I if I

Nirav Shah (43:41)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (43:42)
see see it not changed at all, I'm like, hmm, there's a bit of a problem. But I would also like to see you know a rejig from that. You know, go, well hang on.

Nirav Shah (43:53)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (43:54)
Guys, we told you we were so simple. You said we were simple in our warehouse operations. Why are you still saying it's gonna take us two weeks to get the configuration done for that?

Nirav Shah (44:03)
Right.

Peter Nicholson (44:04)
I would want to start to see that early on so I can plan ahead because the next stage is that configuration stage. And me as a business, I need to tell my end users what's going to happen next, right? They've all been dragged away from their normal place of working. They've been putting in an office for the whole week, talking about all of these things that they do. I don't want to just go silent on them. Or at least if I am going to, I want to be able to tell them, look, guys, thank you very much.

Don't think that nothing's happening just because I don't speak to you for another two weeks. These are the these are the things that are going on behind the scenes. I want to be able to give them quite early on what's gonna come up next for them. And I kinda need my partner to to go away, think about that, change the plan accordingly so

Nirav Shah (44:45)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (44:45)
I know how to keep my guys you know, enthusiastic and engaged with the project.

Nirav Shah (44:50)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (44:51)
I don't wanna be in a position where I'm like, guys, great, thank you for that. You did so much talking, cool. See you in four months for UAT. Like it's not gonna

Nirav Shah (44:57)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Emily Browning (45:00)
Got a final thought on Discovery Week, which we didn't mention so far. So if you if you do it in person, face to face, get your vendor to come over to your site, go out for dinner with them and your team multiple times because you get a whole bunch of free advice, you know, during

Nirav Shah (45:15)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (45:16)
that. You know, for the price of dinner, some nice cocktails, or a couple of beers, you'll you're

Nirav Shah (45:20)
Mm-hmm

Emily Browning (45:21)
gonna keep talking about the project and all of those things. We're gonna get more context, but also.

Nirav Shah (45:24)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Browning (45:26)
you know, take your work stream owners or your subject matter experts, your business sponsor, whatever, and just build up, you know, that friendly rapport between everyone because it makes the whole thing so much more enjoyable

Nirav Shah (45:37)
Absolutely.

Emily Browning (45:38)
to be a part of. And also just that humanizing aspect, you know, a lot of a lot of the conversation within the project is very you know, very pointed. It can be

adjacent to debating things, you know, if the vendor's saying, no, I don't think you should do things that way, and you're saying, no, we must. you know, there's definitely it's not quite conflict, but it's not always nice. So it's just grace if you have that kind of social rapport with them as well, because it helps everybody, you know, see that everybody else has the best intentions at heart. I think that should, you'd like to think it goes without saying, but

I don't think it does. If if you can do those nice social things, go somewhere nice for dinner, let people order what they want, get some nice drinks, just make it nice and entertaining for everyone. I think it makes all the difference.

Nirav Shah (46:25)
Yeah, I this is the first real chance for organization alignment, you know, with everybody coming together for a single purpose of making this project successful. I think that's a

Emily Browning (46:35)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (46:36)
great idea, absolutely.

Peter Nicholson (46:37)
Mic drop. Discovery week ticked.

Nirav Shah (46:38)
Yeah.

Emily Browning (46:39)
Ha ha.

Peter Nicholson (46:43)
Okay, cool. Well if you listen to this, if you're about to start your ERP discovery, don't begin by giving everyone a piece of blank paper and say, Write me your wish list.

Nirav Shah (46:54)
Ahahaha

Peter Nicholson (46:56)
I

Emily Browning (46:55)
People do that as well. Take that seriously and don't don't do it.

Nirav Shah (47:00)
Hahaha

Peter Nicholson (47:02)
but yes, if you are about to start, hopefully you found some interesting discussions that we've had today around the do's and don'ts, what to expect and kind of what you need to have in place for Friday to be able to say right, discovery was a success. So if you enjoyed the conversation, make sure that you find us on all major podcast platforms. We also put the video onto YouTube as well. no doubt we'll be plastering it all over LinkedIn.

So make sure you search for the

Nirav Shah (47:28)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (47:29)
ABCs of ERP and beyond. New podcast comes out every two weeks.

Like and subscribe, I guess. No. Smash that like button. For every smashed

Nirav Shah (47:36)
Smash, smash, smash.

Emily Browning (47:36)
Sure.

Peter Nicholson (47:41)
like button we will donate one pound

Nirav Shah (47:45)
Uh-huh.

Peter Nicholson (47:46)
to something. I don't know, it could be we will plant one tree somewhere.

Emily Browning (47:45)
Happy thought money.

Nirav Shah (47:51)
Yes, there you go.

Peter Nicholson (47:52)
But do not come to me for proof. I'll just actually I'll just take picture of

Nirav Shah (47:55)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (47:56)
the same tree from different angles. I guess that could work. good. Well thank you very much.

Emily Browning (47:59)
We're planting the seeds

of knowledge.

Nirav Shah (48:00)
Yep, absolutely. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep, yep.

Peter Nicholson (48:01)
There we go. That should be our subtitle. The ABCs of ERP and Beyond Planting the Seeds of Knowledge. Okay.

Well, as ever, thank you very much. And unfortunately, this is the first episode where we will not be joined by our fourth unofficial guest. He would normally be coming jumping up on here. But

Nirav Shah (48:20)
Mm-hmm. Yes, he would be.

Peter Nicholson (48:24)
unfortunately Morgan is no longer with us. But he's with us in spirit with the

Okay. Here he is. I should put him here. He has jumped up.

Nirav Shah (48:30)
There he is. Exactly.

Emily Browning (48:30)
So he is yes.

Peter Nicholson (48:32)
Here he is again. With his gormless look. but thank you very much. and I will catch you both of you in two weeks' time.

Emily Browning (48:40)
See you next time.

Nirav Shah (48:41)
Take care, folks.