What does a day on the floor deliver before an ERP implementation?
Ten workshops in a meeting room produce a process the way the department heads think it works. One day on the floor produces how it really works.
Short answer. A plan that matches how your company really works: the workarounds, the post-its and next year's plans. And people who help build instead of working around the system, because they were heard before a single screen was drawn.
What you see
The delivery note that isn't scanned, because the scanner hangs at the other loading dock. The planning that's in the system, and the real planning on the whiteboard next to it. The post-it on the accounting screen with the customer numbers that are "always different". The technician who only enters his hours on Friday, from memory. None of those things is in a process description. All of them decide whether a system gets used.
What you hear
From the driver: which addresses in the system are wrong, and at which customers a delivery always means waiting. From the front desk: which question they get five times a day. From the CEO: the acquisition that's coming, the second site, the product that launches next year. A plan that doesn't know those things is already out of date next year.
What you do with it
Out of that comes a plan that matches reality and looks ahead: which processes first, what can be standard and what can't, which tools can disappear, and phases with a fixed subscription fee for each. No forty-page document nobody reads. A list we commit to.
The biggest effect you only see later
People who've been heard build along. Whoever helped build it uses the system. Adoption with us isn't a separate phase at the end, with training sessions and a champion programme. It starts on the first day, on the shop floor.
What we ask of you
Access to every key department and every key person, from the driver to the CEO. Honesty about what doesn't work, or what does. And the time to do it. How many days that is depends on your company. It's always less than the months you lose on a system nobody uses.
First empathise, understand, and then do. That's why we're called MPAT: as in eMPAThy.
One insight from the floor a month.
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