Eight Mantras to a Successful Software Implementation

203936 Resource 102363 102466 102466 1210690478972 1210690130442 Controlled Implementation Success: Yes or No

It all boils down to 1s and 0s

I have a very similar discussion with every client on the subject of data conversion. It goes like this:Me: Data conversion is very difficult and time consuming Client: I don't understand - doesn't NetSuite have a way of doing this Me: Of course it does, in fact there are several ways to do it. Method is not the issue... Client: So what the problem? We'll give you the files and you load them up. Me: The data is the issue.. Client: NetSuite can't do conversion, I don't understand? Me: Yes, NetSuite enables conversion. The data is what makes it difficult...And on and on. So I ask myself, how do I explain this to a business person? Or, another way of putting it, why is so difficult to explain a fairly straightforward technical point to a business person?The answer, I believe, goes straight to the heart of implementation success. If you can understand this answer then you have a great chance of understanding NetSuite processes and a great chance of using the software to your advantage. Your investment will pay you back ten-fold over time. However, if this answer does not ring a bell for you, then you are going to really struggle, not only with NetSuite, but with any system, suite or no.The answer, I now understand, is a single field. Here, let's enter an email address into NetSuite (because showing is at least 3 magnitudes better than telling). How about tom @gmail.com? Think that will work? How about <a href="mailto:tom@gmail.comm">tom@gmail.comm</a>? How about tom#gmail.com? How about ... the other hundred ways that email addresses have been entered into the legacy system. Do you think that any of these will work? The answer is no. NetSuite understands that email address is a very important data field and they have created a lot of error control in order to make sure that values entered are correct. The email must have the correct syntax: <a href="mailto:tom@gmail.com">tom@gmail.com</a> works, as does <a href="mailto:tomm@gmail.com">tomm@gmail.com</a>. But none of the other examples cited above are allowed. Spaces, the wrong @ sign, the wrong extension, all of these throw an error; and if you take a 100 line legacy data file I would be willing to bet that 33 of the lines have some incorrect syntax like this in the data. If not in the email, then in the address, or in the telephone, or the web address, or in the name, etc..So why is this such an important point to understand? Why is your understanding key to NetSuite implementation success? Because conversion and its challenges unmasks the real character of the computer. At the physical level, a computer disk is a huge number of discrete electrical charges. At the logical level, a charge is a 1, the lack of a charge is a 0. The one is a Yes, the 0 is a No. Every single thing on the screen is there because it answered a series of Yes/No questions. The color of every pixel is the answer to a series of 1s and 0s, a series of Yes/No questions. Every field, task, process is an ever lengthening series of Yes/No questions, cleverly strung together by the developers. Let's be honest, we are all in business, and in business there are a lot of Yes/No questions, and there are a lot of Maybes and Sortofs and Kindofs, too. This is why some business people struggle with implementation and why some skate through it: There are no Maybes in the computer. There is a lot of built in flexibility built into the product, so you may choose among several different ways to, for example, process an order. But in the end, there will ultimately be a Yes/No question. Love it or hate it NOT: It is simply the way computers operate. Implementing NetSuite requires a lot of decisions, and you will have to be ready to say Yes/No over and over again. You will have to remove your business person hat and put your engineer's hat on, at least for a while. One story I remember from my Wayne State days is the story about a building under construction. A structural engineer and a construction engineer meet in one room; two business people meet in another room. All four of them look at the same plans. They all note an anomaly. The plans call for a 110 foot building, while the blueprint calls for a 112 foot building. The two engineers get out the calculators and start banging away, determined to find the error. The two business people agree that 111 feet is not that big a difference either way; they shake and march off to lunch, taking the next quarter's revenue projections. Which building would you rather work in? Right.NetSuite, by the way, has a lot of flexibility and with the right solution you will be able to conduct business the way you want, that way you have found competitively advantageous. But it's really important to understand your process and to think about it as a series of yes/no questions. You will have a more successful implementation if you understand the system and work with it instead of against it. <a title="Eight Mantras" href="http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=18833">In this article</a>, the authors do a good job of detailing some of the necessary prereq's for software implementation, and if you read the subtext closely, they are telling you that you are going to have a lot of Yes/No decisions to make, so get all the help and support you can muster. 9 application/xml false conversion netsuite implementation Eight Mantras to a Successful Software Implementation Get all the help and support you can, decisions aren't easy. http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=18833 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 tfoydel 76.226.193.206 false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102363 blog blogsite/SightLines/web