Your personalized road map
Technology Impact Assessments
Find out how your business can get more benefit from technology.
Concrete information to guide your automation decisions
An Analysis & Information Services ERP Technology Consultant will create a personalized road map showing how software can best optimize the workflow in your departments as you manage change, address problems, prepare budgets and mitigate risk. The result is clearly defined problems, solutions, and a course of action to optimally automate your success.
Your team will work with technology experts who understand business processes, manufacturing, supply chain management, and accounting. The culmination of the Technology Impact Assessment will allow for a collaborative session to brainstorm innovative ideas that will impact the bottom line.
Technology Impact Assessment Best Practices
Step 1
Our analysts interview people in all of your departments to understand your facility.
Step 2
Analysts assess your workflow and technology to share industry best practices.
Step 3
Our experts will overlay your goals for profit, growth and social impact.
Step 4
Certified consultants gather strategy and options to review recommendations.
Step 5
AIS takes the next steps to start the implementation process without workflow disruption.
Why do companies hire ais to conduct the technology impact assessment?
1
They have been through a failed ERP implementation. They value an unbiased view of their business from a company that has taken the time to understand their workflows, accounting and software functionality requirements – tapping into decades of experience of what’s worked well for others.
2
They want to move to a new system efficiently with a clear vision and scope in hand.
3
They want expert technical guidance on the entire scope of the ERP implementation to ensure an easy transition.
AIS Technology Impact Assessment
Learn more about how we assess your operations and workflow to find opportunities to increase the value delivered by automations.
View or download the PDF—The Value of a Technology Impact Assessment.
Technology Impact Assessment breakdown
- Workflow assessment – Define the bottleneck and what it is costing your company.
- Technology assessment – Where your technology is and not working well.
- Use assessment – What operational efficiency is in place from the technology you have in place now.
- Problem cost assessment – Where your incurring direct costs and lost-opportunity costs due to breaks in workflow and technology.
- A Proposal for Success – What is the optimal workflow and the resultant effects that the investment would make
Work with ease
Improving the quality of your life is the goal that guides our assessment process. When operations are efficient and correctly automated, stress disappears.
Why do we interview people all around your company when we’re doing a technology assessment?
Companies can have critical discreet knowledge about a problem that only one employee knows. Hearing from many people during our assessment process leads to a fuller assessment and smarter solution. Here are a few benefits from using this approach:
1. Connect the dots to prioritize ripple-effect problems
Maybe a busy manager regularly falls behind in approving orders, and nobody’s realized the full impact of this backlog across the company. For example, inventory isn’t depleted until the order finally goes through. That means the purchasing manager doesn’t know the true value of inventory, and costly decisions are being made on a million dollars in assets.
Or sometimes the actual root of a larger issue is at an individual employee level, and the issue would be eliminated if changes were made to that person’s software screen to handle one weird thing that’s critical in their job.
2. View standard procedures with fresh eyes for opportunities
When interviewing employees, we often discover people spending 10% or more of their time dealing with tedious work that they believe is normal or “the way it’s always been done,” when in fact those things can be quickly automated to make their jobs easier.
3. Find the best ways to align top-down strategies and bottom-up tactics
Information from the interviews gives management helpful understandings. And the information documented from the interview process ensures that training on any changes can be properly tailored to each person’s job so that the new software will get used well.
4. Ask questions to understand the true workplace impacts
Most people don’t naturally talk about dependencies until asked. For example, a problem that rarely happens isn’t mentioned unless a direct question is asked. The problem may have no importance, or high importance. If it only happens once a year and people push through it, but it’s a half a million dollar screw-up, that’s important.
5. Ensure that everyone is heard and valued
Face-to-face conversations and careful listening include people into the company’s process from the beginning.
6. Gain an insightful and clear picture
- Document what the actual workflow is.
- Where is it flowing quite well?
- Where do things get constrained? How often?
- What are the upstream and downstream effects, and the costs?
- What workarounds are in place?
- Which workarounds are brilliantly effective and which are wreaking havoc?
- What ideas do people have for improvements?
- Which areas will need to be ready to flexibly change or scale as the company changes?
Example actionable insights from Technology Impact Assessments
- “When we hit our 3-year growth target, the volume will cause $150K in new workflow issues. We should budget $50K to integrate our shop floor and warehouse management systems then.”
- “Our manual process for inventory forecasting is costing us $600K a year and constrains people from doing 30% more work. It could be automated for $150K in 60 days.”
- “Here’s a phased plan to replace our accounting system without the disruptions to daily operations that we were worried about.”
- “We could change 3 small things in our CRM to deliver better service levels than our competitors in a critical area.”
- “These ideas to simplify computer screens and do job-specific software training would double our back office productivity. It sure would eliminate steps that frustrate our people.”
- “Our workflow is good overall, but we have two holes costing $1.2M per year! It’s our order entry errors and our struggle to stay on top of RMAs and RTVs. There are plug-in modules to automate the RMA RTV tracking. And we can get pricing rules and product look-ups added in to prevent recurring OE errors.”
100% satisfaction guarantee
Our Technology Impact Assessments range from $2,500 for simple workflows to more than $10,000 for complex ERP systems. The TIA will propose solutions that save more than the investment and define places where technology can drive additional revenues. If you feel your assessment delivers less value after we’ve reviewed it together, just say so and we’ll change your price to whatever amount you judge the assessment’s value to be. We never recommend a solution that costs more than the return it will provide.