Nowadays, a significant number of companies run their ERP application on-prem. They purchase licenses and run the application on an outsourced infrastructure or in their data centre. The big ERP players have been changing their business focus for a while. It goes more in the direction towards cloud SaaS solutions. Technically the ERP application runs on the ERP player’s infrastructure. The Product is now called a service and offered as a subscription in many different flavours.

In principle, you can subscribe, and that’s it. Let us briefly stop and re-think the scenario from A to Z.

The movement mentioned above is significantly impacting the end-user and their companies. It comes with up-sides and flip-sides, depending on how you, as a user/company, look at it. However, it is something that needs serious consideration.
If you plan to move things like accounting, finance, HR, travel expenses, SCM or other functional blocks to a SaaS ERP, some considerations may help to start a good journey.

The points below are intended to check and completed for a move to a cloud project. I’m happy to debate and participate.

Pre-Checks
• Sort out the terms on-prem, cloud (hosting), hosting and SaaS.
• Running a pure SaaS solution means it goes by the standard.
• Legal requirements like data protection/privacy, retention policies, and SAAS ops sites have an impact.
• The SaaS costs may not that transparent as they may seem (consider the number of tenants, the yearly amount of data stored, the retention policies,…).
• Monthly updates, is that something your company can deal with?
• Application management in the cloud is something different compared with on-prem.
• Infrastructural impact – how is the cloud ERP interacting with other components and systems in the IT landscape?

Project organization
• Develop a clear migration concept, considering data migration, services, interfaces, reconciliation and cut-over.
• Allocate internal resources that can effectively cope with the project (capacity, knowledge and project-wise)
• Pick a professional distributor for the ERP technical work stream
• Readiness check regarding processes, especially financial processes such as MEC, YE and audits.

Project challenges
• Data structures
• Data migration / historical
• Functionality, down stripping of tailor-made adoptions
• Interfaces may significantly change (file and DB vs API).
• External system integration can cascade workload towards other infrastructural components.
• External devices, such as scanners, printers, barcode readers, etc.
• User, rights, views individual settings
• …