The Business Case For ERP Systems Upgrade:
    Business System Optimizations Analysis

By Jerry Wills, Vice President Customer Solutions

With the powerful array of product enhancements and new capabilities in glovia.com 7.1 — along with the rapidly expanding business needs of Glovia customers in ultra competitive manufacturing markets — Professional Services has been busy working with many of you on an upgrade to your Glovia system in 2004.

Multiple Business Benefits
The benefits of systems migration at this time are many and significant.

Of course, you can make immediate use of the newest features and facilities — currently including powerful collaboration and integration technology, Supply Chain Management, and Business Intelligence as well as other web-based features and systems tools and technologies.

Another point to consider seriously is the establishment of a strong enough platform upon which to go forward to even newer versions at some point in the future. glovia.com 7.1 has evolved to become very powerful and feature-rich and is based on advanced technologies and programming. Those of you on much earlier versions may soon find yourselves too far behind the development curve and facing too great a canyon to leap when future versions of the product are released. These days, you can only skip so many cycles before you face a total reimplementation versus an upgrade.

Further, a migration to the current version gives you the opportunity to align your current and future business processes with the most powerful, state-of-the-art capabilities of our software, which is heavily driven by customer requests and the R&D strength and commitment of Fujitsu. By using migration as a focal point to validate your current business processes and methodologies against the latest best business practices and technological potential, you open the gateway to revitalize and transform your operations, thereby maximizing your performance levels in customer satisfaction and profitablility for the foreseeable future.

Customization
A key reason to migrate resolves around the amount of customization that you have performed on the software. We incorporate as much customer-driven modification as we can and try to eliminate as much customization need as possible with every new standard version of glovia.com. Also, our goal is to reduce the customization level in a given implementation by at least 50 percent via migration-though of course a few exceptional cases have fallen outside of this target.

When previous customizations become fully supported and standardized in a current product, customers save a significant amount on support costs and gain new efficiencies in processing, along with other benefits. However, Glovia remains committed to any customer who needs to retain some amount of customization and we have a dedicated Migration Group to assist in moving your customized code to the latest release.

Business System Optimization Analysis
Naturally there are a few concerns regarding the migration process so I thought I would give you an introduction to our Business System Optimization Analysis — or "Gap" Analysis — service, the goal of which is to assess the specific business benefits and the overall business case for a systems migration — even to develop an ROI if necessary. This is also where we determine the potential to re-align your use of glovia.com with both your current and future business processes and objectives.

The process begins with a five day on site review of your current business practices and processes. We also carefully assess how you intend to change your business: your short-term and long-term goals and pending growth plans.

Following this assessment we prepare a detailed report and presentation which will:

• Identify areas for improvement
• Identify the additional benefits for current and future goals from implementing new capabilities available in glovia.com 7.1
• Determine whether new hardware is required for the software upgrade, and if so, then carry out sizing
• Assess how you are currently using glovia.com in your business
• Determine what customization has been applied to the current version of glovia.com (via the Code Comparison Tool)
• Determine what customization has been replaced by standard functionality in the new release
• Estimate how much of existing customization needs to be migrated across to the new release
• Determine what new functionality you intend to use in the new release
• Put together a high-level project plan and timeline for the upgrade and migration
• Determine both Glovia and customer resource requirements to complete upgrade and migration

The entire Business System Optimization Analysis cycle takes less than thirty days and will provide you with a very clear picture of the business case for systems migration.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss an analysis at your company, please let me know. Have a great new year.