Why you need Pre-Implementation Consulting

Pre-Implementation consulting is a service aimed to assess your company’s readiness for the implementation, to assess your company’s current level of process maturity, and to organize riger^® implementation. Our pre-implementation consulting is more of a strategic mission rather than an operational one, and as such it should be approached strategically. Main reason why riger^® pre-implementation consulting might be important for you to consider is to assure that your new riger^® solution implementation is successful, it is used effectively, and you achieve your operational goals using our solution.

Involving right people together to do hard work is a key to successful outcome. It’s important to involve key members from the very beginning of the implementation process, which starts from the decision to implement a business solution to improve your processes. Support from top management to general workers is what it takes for the new implementation not only to be successful, but for the rest of its lifecycle to be productive. Thus, your team must have representatives of all involved departments in your company, the so-called champions. These champions are the first in line to adopt planned organizational changes and learn novel processes riger^® implementation brings. In turn, champions will lead organizational changes and guarantee high adoption rates by their colleagues all over the company. Usually, champions are the first to get initial training and test out new features. Hence, it’s important to have experienced and skilled employees in the implementation team, so that they could drive test riger^® solution to the full potential, uncover all capabilities, and ask right questions. Such an approach would help keeping all expectations at a manageable level.

In any project, there are needs and wants, must haves and good to haves, required things and optional items. Understanding difference between the later and the former is critical in assessing initial scope, most importantly what’s in scope, what’s out of it, and could be done at a later stage. Why? Because this helps to take off any project faster. Putting most critical business requirements into the initial scope and leaving all other things for next phases is most important, yet a challenging strategy. Our experienced and customer-oriented team correctly understand client issues and help them start off projects lean with only necessary things in scope. They will also draw a plan for next phases in case clients require additional items that need to be done. So, understanding what you need for your new implementation to be successful starts from requirements gathering process, then filtering out critical to success requirements and formulating your scope, and finally, approval of the proof of concept, when riger^® team showcases how things are going to work in our solutions.

Once most needs and wants are defined, the turn comes to understanding what is technically possible, what is not possible, and what’s not possible but could be worked around. Usually, this topic is not much discussed from the technical perspective with our clients because respective answers would lead away from real business issues. At whatever stage of an implementation you are, technical capabilities or limitations, depending on the perspective, are understood through a series of solution demonstrations which we organize for our clients. These show case scenarios with multiple Q&A sessions are enough for our clients and riger^® team to come to common understanding of what could be done and how it could be done. Depending on flexibility and agreement between both parties to the proposed and discussed solutions, next step is to assess clients’ readiness level for the upcoming implementation process.

This process involves both riger^® team and a client’s team to organize upcoming implementation and prepare all required project inputs. After figuring out business requirements and defining a scope, this data gathering process focuses on collecting all necessary information regarding your company, daily documents, how data is structured and stored, and what software is used. First, it is important to, basically, import data into a new solution and/or build required integrations with the third-party software, hence, these details are required. Secondly, this process also helps to inventorize all your data, allowing you to see what you have or, may be, what is missing. Lastly, this allows riger^® team to assess your company and your processes, and roll out a Readiness Assessment report, which will summarize what your company has on hands to kick off the project, what may be additionally required from the client side, and an assessment of the maturity level of your business processes. Our Process Maturity assessment is adapted from the original CMMI model and evaluates your business processes in terms of digitalization and automation levels. The higher the level, the better your company is adapted for Industry 4.0 standards.

Finally, when you have your team actively involved into the project events, you have your initial scope of work, understand all possibilities of riger^® solution, and have your company, documents, data, and process maturity level assessed, it’s time to set goals and prepare a project plan. With realistic expectations and known current process maturity level, it is possible to set such goals that could be measured, managed and, much importantly, achieved. For example, you have your current process maturity level assessed at level 1.3, you would like to get at level 3 after implementation of riger^® solution. With our Pre-Implementation Consulting services, you know what you need to prepare and input into the new system, you know who will need training in your company, you know how the system works and what value riger^® solution brings. These things are not just uncertain perspective, but manageable expectations with known ahead outcomes. Plus, results can be measured in simple numbers of the process maturity levels. The only thing that is left is to schedule implementation process in our calendars and roll out a detailed project plan outlining what’s to be done, who’s going to be involved, when deliverables are to be ready, how long implementation is going to take, and how much it will cost.