Fixing the Process Before Installing the System

The Challenge

When organizations implement a new ERP system, they face a choice that is rarely made explicitly: do they redesign their processes before going live, or do they migrate the processes they already have into a new platform? Most choose the latter, either because the process work feels slow, or because the pressure to reach go-live is too strong to allow time for it. The result, consistently, is a more expensive system that delivers less than it should.

A pharmaceutical facility operator preparing to introduce both a new ERP system and a new production planning system made a deliberate choice to do this differently. Before any implementation work began, the organization needed a rigorous review of its existing operational processes — an honest assessment of where they were working, where they were not, and what a better version would look like. The goal was not just to prepare for the ERP rollout. It was to ensure that the system would be built around processes that were genuinely efficient, fit for purpose, and capable of supporting a more agile way of working going forward.

The scope covered the full range of core operational processes, including order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay, and extended to defining the specifications that would guide the ERP and production planning system configurations. The output needed to serve as a blueprint not just for the immediate implementation but for other areas of the organization facing similar transformation challenges.

The Approach

Discovery: Understanding the Reality on the Ground

The first phase was structured around building a precise and unfiltered picture of how the organization actually operated. change2target conducted interviews with key contacts across all relevant functions, mapping systems, processes, structures, and data requirements end-to-end. This was not a desk exercise. The goal was to understand the operational reality that the ERP system would need to serve, including the informal workarounds, the legacy structures, and the dependencies that rarely appear in process documentation but drive day-to-day behavior nonetheless.

The output was a complete end-to-end process map that gave the technical implementation team a reliable foundation to work from, and gave the business a baseline against which improvements could be evaluated.

Challenging Workshops: Confronting the Gap

With the current state documented, a series of structured workshops was used to bring internal and external perspectives into direct dialogue. The workshops were designed to be genuinely challenging rather than confirmatory. The facilitation approach was built around identifying the distance between current practice and established best practice, surfacing non-value-adding process steps, redundant structures, and system elements that were adding complexity without adding capability.

The workshops also served a critical alignment function. Bringing stakeholders from different business units into the same room, working from the same process maps and the same gap analysis, created a shared understanding of where the problems lay and why the proposed changes were necessary. That shared understanding is the foundation on which stakeholder commitment is built.

Solution Workshops: Designing What Comes Next

The third phase translated the gap analysis into concrete solutions. Working across all major process areas and the interactions between departments, the workshops developed best-practice designs for each core process, including the communication structures and tools required to support them in practice — covering areas such as time management and performance tracking for field operations.

A Vision Sprint concluded this phase: a focused working session dedicated to translating the agreed process designs into precise specifications for the ERP and production planning systems. These specifications defined exactly what the systems needed to do, rather than leaving configuration decisions to the implementation team to resolve without business context.

A business case for the developed solution was built in parallel, quantifying the value of the proposed changes and providing the leadership team with a clear basis for investment decisions.

The Results

The project delivered what ERP implementations most frequently lack: a clean, agreed, and well-documented set of operational processes ready to be implemented, rather than inherited. Processes were streamlined across all core operations. Non-value-adding steps were eliminated. The specifications produced for the ERP and production planning systems reflected genuine business requirements rather than the defaults of the implementation partner.

Critically, every business unit and stakeholder group involved in the process reached commitment to the agreed solution before implementation began. In large-scale ERP programs, that alignment is itself a significant achievement. It removes one of the most common causes of mid-implementation scope changes, delays, and cost overruns.

The work also produced a reusable blueprint applicable to other areas of the client organization facing similar transformation challenges, extending the value of the project beyond its immediate scope.

Key Takeaway

ERP implementations are technology projects in name. In practice, they are process transformation programs that happen to involve a technology change. The organizations that treat them as the former tend to spend more, deliver less, and find themselves back in the same conversation two or three years later.

For executives overseeing major system implementations, the most valuable investment is not in the software selection or the implementation partner. It is in the process work that happens before a single system configuration is made. Clean processes, agreed specifications, and genuine stakeholder alignment before go-live are what separate implementations that deliver on their business case from those that merely go live on time.