How-to Guide: Strategically Staff Your ERP Implementation
APRIL 01, 2022 02:30 AM
Businesses that take steps towards adopting Oracle ERP Cloud or On-Premises applications, like E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft, are on the right path towards digital transformation. However, finding the right resource(s) required to implement and maintain these complex applications can be tricky and require a search beyond the resumes listed on LinkedIn and Indeed.
Most of the time, these high-demand resources are already working full-time or as a consultant for various projects, meaning they don't allocate their time towards looking for other opportunities. Instead, Oracle consultants team up with Oracle consulting and solutions partners capable of strategically staffing them in projects that require their niche skills and qualifications. In this blog, we will outline the steps companies should take in order to successfully staff their ERP implementation.
Step 1: Identify the Project Scope
The first step in strategically staffing your Oracle ERP Cloud implementation is to define the big picture of what you are trying to accomplish and the related scope of the project. A well-defined project scope will help to best define the skills needed to accomplish your goal. Let's review the examples below:
Project Overview 1: New Oracle Cloud Applications Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Financials Management implementation.
-> Scope: Financials
Project Overview 2: PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Digital Transformation to Oracle Cloud Applications Human Capital Management (HCM)
-> Scope: Human Resources Core, Benefit, Recruiting, Onboarding
Step 2: Current Staff & Gap Assessment
Next you will need to assess your current staff and their skills, compare the resources you have available to allocate to the project, and identify any functional gaps that may exist. Additionally, you will need to assess any technical gaps specifically related to report development, integration, and security since these are known pain points for new cloud customers.
Step 3: Determine the Resource Type
Once you have identified the gaps you will need to determine whether you are best served to hire a Certified Oracle Cloud Consulting Services Company, hire direct employees, hire contract consultants, or a hybrid of these options. There are pros and cons to each type of option.
- Hiring a Certified Oracle Cloud Partner for Cloud Advisory Services gives you assurance that you will have specialized resources who have experience implementing Oracle Cloud Applications many times over and often ensures success. This requires due diligence on your part to assign resources to work alongside the consulting company resources for knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is essential to self-sufficiency post implementation when the Cloud Migration Services are completed.
- Hiring direct employees takes time and effort. Finding employees for Oracle Cloud Applications is difficult because there is a limited population of people with Oracle Cloud experience. Hiring direct employees can be challenging for many other reasons. Often, the biggest obstacle is lack of sufficient budget does not meet the demands of qualified candidates preventing us from hiring. Other times, employees cannot be onboarded fast enough to fill the gaps before the planned start of the project.
- Hiring "best of breed" contract consultants is often the quickest and most cost-effective way to access top Oracle Cloud Applications expertise and fill only the gaps that exist on your current team. Also, contract consultants by nature have seen multiple client environments, encountered a variety of Oracle Cloud implementation issues, and can be selected based on industry specific expertise. Contract consultants can often complete tasks faster and better than a direct employee that has been limited to one or two companies Oracle Cloud ecosystems.
Moreover, the reasons you hire direct candidates, and the reasons direct candidates select employers, is completely different than the reasons you select contract consultants and contract consultants select companies and projects they will take. In short, direct employees at a minimum must fit company culture and into the team long term; they look for a career path, fair pay, benefits, stability, and vacation when deciding to hire on. As a result, hiring direct employees often takes three plus months, at a minimum.
Companies hire contract consultants based on expertise, not solely because the fit company culture or team. Contract consultants take assignments because they like the project and the fact that they can come in, provide value, and move onto another challenging project that will advance their skills.
Step 4: Source your Oracle Talent
Once you have determined the option(s) that aligns best with your company philosophy and culture, you will need to determine how you will go and find the talent you need.
- Option 1: You could post direct hire and / or contract positions yourself, sift through the respondents resumes, contact them, screen them, interview them, and go through the vetting process on your own; however, this requires at the very least a resource, good talent acquisition process, recruiting capabilities, technical knowledge, functional expertise, and a great deal of time.
- Option 2: Another approach is to engage with a staffing company to help you with the process. This will require allocating additional funds to pay placements fees for direct employees and higher contract consultant rates for best of breed Oracle Cloud Professionals.
When the determination has been made to engage a Consulting Services company, you must further determine what companies can best serve your needs. Not all Consulting Services companies are created equal. First consideration is whether to work with a generalized staffing company that will work on all your needs whether they are direct, contract to direct, or contract.
There are many companies that try to be all things to all people and work on any role from administrative assistants to executive roles with no particular focus on technical verses non-technical people. Other companies specialize in information technology but have no particular focus on the level of expertise or a particular technology vendor. While these companies will be happy to assist you in filling your roles, a lot of time can be wasted when a staffing company does not focus on the same technology day in and day out... Then there are pure play Oracle Cloud Consulting Companies that only focus on Oracle Cloud Talent.
Choose the Best Option for YOU
Select a Staffing company that specializes in Information Technology and Direct Placement services to assist you with hiring full-time employees. They will best serve you based on their understanding of the longer direct placement process, the nuances of why you select people, and why they select you as a company. Avoid completely generalized companies that will work on anything that you will give them.
Select a pure play
Oracle Cloud specialized staffing company or Oracle Cloud Implementation partner who offers their employees on an individual contract consulting basis for your Oracle Cloud Consultant's needs. An Oracle Cloud specialized company will have the functional and technical expertise required to fully understand your needs and to qualify the consultant for your project. They will also have a pre-built network of best of breed Oracle Cloud consultants that they have worked with in the past. Since the nature of consultants is to take temporary projects assignments their availability is reoccurring. A specialized Oracle Cloud consultancy will have a catalogue of these people they draw on for their clients and know when they are completing their projects, when they are available for you to hire, and an intimate understanding of their skills and how they fit your project.
SMACT Works is a technology-focused systems integrator and IT/ERP consulting firm. We deliver end-to-end consulting, managed, and implementation services for Oracle Cloud Applications, IaaS & PaaS, On-Premise PeopleSoft & EBS Applications. Headquartered in Dublin, OH, we have a global presence with North America and Asia offices. We are an Oracle Gold Partner Cloud Standard, ISO 9001, and 27001 certified delivery organization serving customers with Excellence and Integrity.
