As you may have seenCompriseIT have jumped on the BYD train initially to use CRM and HR. We have plans to implement Finance and Billing early in 2012.
In this blog I describe my experiences of implementing the solution which took me less than 12 hours over one week, most of which was done with my MacBook Air on my lap, half watching the TV with a glass of red by my side.
I am not suggesting that the glass of red was a must have, it more points to the fact that I didn’t spend too much time figuring out what I needed to do, more time was spent waiting for the system to generate the next stage of the process.
So in this blog I will describe the 4 main steps :-
- Getting the Development System and Scoping the Project
- Organisation Setup and Fine Tuning
- Migrating Data, Testing and Technical Go-live
- Cut over, Training and Business Go-live Day
Step 1 : Getting the Development System and Scoping the Project – 2 hours
Once we had decided to go ahead with the project, the paper work was signed and by the time I got home that evening our “development” system was ready. Using the information from the e-mail, that evening I creating my first users with roles for configuration and scoped the project.
The project is scoped by selecting / deselecting which functional areas you want to implement and answering some questions which enable or disable features, with the system dealing with dependencies. Mostly I followed the guidance in the CRM Self Implementation Tool but I added extra areas for the HR scope that we needed.
Step 2 : Organisation and Fine Tuning – 2 hours
On the second evening it was time to hit the fine tuning. This is another series of questions / check lists and activities that needed to be completed.
The organisation structure was the most interesting part of the set up as each organisation element you create can have different (and multiple roles) in the system. This really speeded up the set up as making something a cost centre, profit centre, sales organization and legal entity was all defined by a series of check boxes. Best of all the structure I set up in the development system could be easily imported into the live system saving time.
The next step was to check through things like number ranges and the values and descriptions for various drop down lists. 90% of the time the standards in the system suited our needs with a few tweeks here and there.
Step 3 : Migrating Data, Testing and Technical Go-live – 4 hours
As we were moving from Excel for our HR system this data had to be manually loaded to the system so for testing I create 3 employees/users who would have different work centres.
I then worked with the DBA of our old campaign management system (SQLServer system), to download our existing accounts, contacts and opportunites and ran these into the system using the bulk templates provided. This took a few goes as the validation in ByDesign was better than then old system.
With this data in the system I was able to run through some testing / training by creating leads, opportunities, activities and campaigns, with all going well. This was also good preparation for training the rest of the team on the go-live day.
At the end of this session, which stretched over 2 evenings I requested that the development system be copied to the live system. I also got our work placement student to create a couple of graphics so I could tell which system was which and created a couple of short cut URLs for Test and Live.
Step 4 : Cut over, Training and Business Go-live Day – 4 hours
The first thing to do with the new live system was to import the organisation structure and create all the employees and users.
Then the test data migration spreadsheets were copied to the live version and uploaded into the system and we informed SAP that we were now intending to use the system productively and I set the project as completed.
User IDs were sent to the team and I set up a meeting to launch the system and officially go-live.
I got everyone together to explain and demo the system and point them at the built in training. We had a couple of issues with browser versions and the Silverlight plug in, but these were soon fixed and we were off and running.
At the end of the day it all seemed too simple – now we are planning our next project to turn on finance/invoicing and turn off QuickBooks – followed shortly by integration to our Agile Development Platform Jira.
In future posts I will talk about how we are using the system.
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