Accelerate Your Cloud ERP Journey: Arrive Safely with Copado

Few projects have the potential to change your business as much as a Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. But there’s a catch — Cloud ERP implementations can quickly spiral out of control. Gartner’s 2021-2023 Emerging Technologies Roadmap rates Cloud ERP projects as both highest value and highest risk. 

Cloud ERP Can Transform Your Business

Upgrading your on-premises ERP solution to the cloud can unlock a wide assortment of powerful benefits. Cloud-native advantages include:

• Reduced Maintenance Effort
• Reduced Infrastructure Costs
• Infrastructure as Code
• Always Updated
• Easy Access
• Dynamic Licensing

Moving to the Cloud Requires Lots of Change

To capture these benefits, you need to undergo a substantial ERP transition project. Whether you're going fully cloud-native or moving into a hybrid model, uprooting your core business system and implementing it to a SaaS environment involves many changes.

Changes to Business Processes: You’ll be changing the way your entire business operates.

Changes to Your Software Landscape: You're not just changing your ERP system — you’re also changing legacy interfaces and interconnected systems.

Changes to Your End-User Activity: Finally, you're changing your end-user experience. You'll be impacting the day-to-day jobs of your employees.

This Change Brings a High Level of Risk

Any major change comes with risk. And Cloud ERP brings more risk than most. Few projects have an impact on so many areas of your business. Moving to a Cloud ERP affects quite a few people — and there are many opportunities for things to go wrong.

Business Process Risks

We all start projects with the best intentions — but incorrect assumptions can creep into the planning stages. Business processes need to be planned out before they’re implemented. They must be clear and easy to understand. If they don’t accurately represent your business needs, they’ll do more harm than good.

Software Landscape Risks

It’s all too common for software development to make things more complex than necessary. I’m sure you’ve experienced it yourself: The customer asks for a bridge, delivery builds a tunnel. Cloud ERP implementations have to be built around simplicity. The ERP configuration must match the business processes agreed upon at the start of the project. Plus, your legacy interfaces need to be as streamlined as possible.  With Cloud ERP, you don’t control updates. ERP vendors will push changes directly to you — and your interfaces may need to change in the future. 

End-User Activity Risks

Even if you build the perfect solution that lives up to every business requirement, you still need to enable your team. Far too often, end-user training is overlooked in software development. The training team is barely given enough to get acquainted with the new tool — let alone develop collateral. If your users don’t know how to perform your business process, your business will grind to a halt.

Cloud Solutions Offer Limited Ability for Quick Workarounds

These risks are compounded by Cloud ERP. With traditional software, you’d have the flexibility to make quick fixes and workarounds. But you don’t have that luxury with cloud solutions. You need to get every change right the first time. If not, your system will be tarnished forever. 

How Do You Derisk Your Cloud ERP Transformation?

A successful transformation can be broken into 3 high-level steps:

1. Guarantee your business processes will be understood and documented.
2. Test your end-to-end functionality according to your documented business processes — Core ERP and all interfaced/legacy systems.
3. Keep your end-users in the loop on what's coming next.

A Consistent Source of Truth Across Your ERP Deployment

These steps are sequential. Your business processes become your tests. And your tests become your end-user training documents. To derisk your Cloud ERP, you need a single source of truth stretching across your entire project. But maintaining multiple sources of information adds complexity. Your Business Processes, Test Cases and User Training Documentation must line up perfectly.

Arrive Safely with Copado Robotic Testing

Keeping your project documentation accurate and up-to-date can be a trickly challenge. Separate versions of the truth will lead to defective functionality and a terrible user experience. But with Copado Robotic Testing, you get a single source of truth. Your business process information is created in a single location. It takes no additional effort to automatically generate:

• Business Process Documentation
• End-to-End Test Cases
• End-User Training Documentation

Everyone Stays Updated with Copado Robotic Testing

Finally, Copado Robotic Testing takes care of your documentation creation effort. You just need to enter your processes in a single location to generate three different documents — all available at the click of a button. You can create your business process documentation, tests, and training documentation in one fell swoop.