Over the past couple of months, a team from Meaden & Moore’s Management Consulting Group assessed several business processes beginning-to-end at one of our clients.

The scope of our analysis included: 

• • Finished goods inventory planning and replenishment
  • Purchased materials inventory planning and replenishment
  • Procure-to-receive process
  • Inventory accounting process (physical transaction through posting to GL)
  • Financial reporting process

The client uses the IQMS ERP solution to support its sales, production, supply chain, and accounting processes. We found, however, in practice that IQMS is heavily augmented and even replaced, at times, with Excel and Outlook.

Working with the client’s employees, our consultants walked through the selected business processes step-by-step and task-by-task. After those exercises and together with the client, we defined the features that leading GAAP and APICS principles would have the client performing in an integrated, well-controlled ERP software solution. We found:

• • The client’s current version of IQMS supports 94% of the features and requirements the client agrees they need
  • An upgrade brings some nominal benefit, but not enough to warrant an immediate disruption
  • Only 43% of the required features are actually in use

James Harrington famously said that “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

Our ERP improvement process begins with Harrington’s points in mind…..measurement is the first step.

With the measurement done, presented, and understood, we’re planning to begin the efforts bringing our recommendations to fruition later this month.

Afterwards, we’ll conduct another ERP utilization and fit audit with hopes of showing marked improvement over the 43% baseline figure.

Please contact us with questions.