The Importance of an ERP Health Check
By Glenn Hofmann, KES Managing Director
Investing in an ERP system is a significant decision for most organizations, so we recommend protecting this investment with an annual ERP health check to ensure the core system is running smoothly and a business process review to improve optimization. Read part two of our ERP optimization article series: The Importance of a Business Process Review
Part One: ERP Health Check
For most of us, the idea of a periodic health check is something we know we need to do. Whether an annual physical or scheduled vehicle maintenance, we know performing checkups is necessary to fix current issues and identify potential problems before they become issues. While it might be second nature for us to maintain our health and vehicles, businesses often overlook health checks for their ERP system and related processes.
Your ERP system is a complex network of software, data, people, and processes; all working together to manage your business. Over time, as your company evolves, business processes or system configurations that made sense in the past may no longer be optimal — or worse — may be detrimental to moving your business forward. Often companies overlook or push aside red flags; until they are too painful to ignore, much like, ignoring the maintenance light on your car until one day the car won’t run. An ERP system health check can prevent little problems from turning into major issues and help you proactively plan for future business changes.
"An ERP system health check can prevent little problems from turning into major issues and help you proactively plan for future business changes."
At Kraft Enterprise Systems (KES), we are big believers in annual health checks for our clients’ NetSuite ERP environment, which is why we include them in our Customer Care Plans. As part of our basic health check, we will inspect your system configuration settings, installed bundles, customizations, and data usage. With our comprehensive health check, we will also interview your staff to review processes, discuss challenges, and complete go-forward planning. We will produce an extensive report to review with your team. You can use this report as a blueprint for adjustments, or we can work with you to develop an improvement implementation plan.
Since we started conducting client health checks, we've identified a variety of areas for improvements — anything from small screen adjustments to new/updated workflows/reports, all the way to entirely rethinking a business process flow or adding/removing modules. Even if we don't identify any issues, just like a personal physical or vehicle maintenance check, it's good to know everything is running well.
Contact us if you'd like to schedule a health check, so you can take full advantage of NetSuite's capabilities and get the most from your investment. Also, check out our Customer Care Starter Plan for new KES customers.
“The health check that KES completed for us as part of the KES Customer Care Starter Plan was quite the eye opener. They found multiple areas where we could make improvements, including a number of low-hanging fruit items that could be completed very quickly. The larger items they found were then discussed in detail as part of the business process review and putting these together, we were able to create an extensive plan to change the way we use NetSuite to get significantly more value from the system.”
Levi Sweeney
Fayette Industries
Why Kraft Enterprise Systems?
As a full-service NetSuite Solution Provider, we're here to help you implement and optimize NetSuite to take full advantage of its capabilities.