"If you’re about to implement changes in your process?and if you have people who helped the process get to where it was?it’s hard for them to step out of the box and look at it without the restraints they were working with [before the implementation]," says Deborah Joseph, manager of client service programs at CyberCash in Reston, Va. Her company recently underwent a rapid implementation of a CRM package. "Don’t think about trying to replicate the bad process you had. Think about the ideal process you want to get to," she says.

Know Thy Contract

it sounds simple. there’s a fixed price and a fixed timetable, but the devil, as always, is in the details. Fast-track ERP contracts aren’t like traditional ERP agreements. These contracts fix a time line, a price or both, in advance. That’s part of what attracts small companies to fast-track ERP in the first place. Fast-track companies often have spending requirements that call for such up-front agreements.

When Johanson’s company needed to upgrade an HR system that was failing under the weight of integration leaks and overcustomization, company executives balked at the price of ERP. "People choked a little bit on the price," Johanson says. "We were considering the sale of the company to a number of different types of financial organizations. We didn’t want to spend money on HR before selling." So Russell, which did eventually sell to Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual, made a deal with San Francisco-based PeopleSoft for the rapid implementation of an HR system.

Johanson says working through his company’s contract was an eye-opening experience. The process of hashing it out was more difficult than he had expected. He says to remember the vendor is basing its fixed price on the time it will take to implement the applications. The actual cost of software is very low. In this case, time is literally money.

The project planning process, therefore, becomes more important in a fast-track setting than in a traditional ERP setting. The fast-track contract guarantees both what the vendor will give and what the buyer will get. There is little room for application customization with the fast-track route. Companies have to know what they need and make sure they bargain for it up front. The vendor will then be able to base its implementation plan on those decisions.

"[The price] was a guarantee based on the deliverables," Johanson says. "The way they can do a fixed bid is they say, ’This is what we’ll do.’ They’re basing their number on how much time they’re going to have to spend on this." Again, the more an implementation sticks to a template, the less time it will take. In Johanson’s case, PeopleSoft agreed to attempt three data conversions into the new human resources system. After that, Johanson’s company might owe extra money.