What Is ERP Implementation Life Cycle? (Terro Dashner)

What do you mean by ERP implementation life cycle? ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) implementation is done in different phases and these phases are collectively referred to as ERP implementation life cycle. Enterprise Resource Planning is a software system which can be used to control the whole process and operation of a company. It has got so many modules and these modules are connected to a centralized database. With the help of this centralized database, data is efficiently exchanged between modules.

Enterprise Resource Planning system can help a company tremendously when it comes to proper resource management. ERP implementation life cycle has got many phases including discovery, design, development, training, testing, deployment, maintenance and upgrade. Usually, Enterprise Resource Planning implementation takes 18 to 20 months if it's a large enterprise. For large enterprises, the business process is very complex and they have large number of employees and resources to handle. For the same, large companies would require complex Enterprise Resource Planning software system and it can take several months to see through the completion. But for a small or medium size company, you can wrap the implementation sooner compared to a large organization. Also, the implementation is dependent on the complexity of the business process. If the business process doesn't have much complexity, you will be able complete the implementation faster than you think.

Coming back to ERP implementation life cycle, let's see these life cycle phases one after another. The first phase is the discovery. In this phase, you will be basically learning more about the organization and its business process. You will be creating a requirements list at this step. The idea behind this phase is to study the requirements and the organization well so that they can come up with a perfect system. The 2nd phase of Enterprise Resource Planning life cycle is design. As the name indicates, you will be designing the software at this step. You will create a blueprint of the code and the database at this point. You will try to identify the needs of the implementation at this step.

Now it's time for the 3rd phase of Enterprise Resource Planning life cycle. It's none other than development. Obviously, this has to the longest phase of the life cycle as you will be developing the software from scratch. It requires extensive coding and testing. And milestones have to be properly achieved during this phase. Development phase is the most significant one as you are building the whole software during this phase. It can last for several months. Now we enter the 4th phase, i.e. testing. Though we have done intermediate testing, we'll have to do a comprehensive testing of the whole system once the coding is finished.

Once after finishing the 4th phase, you will start the 5th phase, i.e. training. Once after completing the development and testing, you need to train the employees who are going to be benefitted from this system. You need to teach them how to use this system. You need to explain all the modules and features to the concerned users. With that, we come to the final phases, deployment and maintenance. After developing the software system, it's up to the vendor to properly deploy it. They are also supposed to look after the maintenance thereafter.

Processing ...