A year ago a company that rents e-bikes to couriers in Europe came to me. They needed an ERP system that would fully cover their operations.
How it started
The co-owner, who had put serious money into the company, had no visibility into operations. Everything lived in people’s heads and in Telegram chats. The data lived there too, and in Excel. There was a system for renting a bike, but apart from the storefront and payments there was essentially nothing in it: contracts, reports and everything else were done by hand.
I see this in a lot of projects. Many successful businesses are built on improvisation, and not having a clear system doesn’t make a business bad. It means more risk and a lower ceiling for growth. And a system doesn’t have to be digital: the church has existed without any ERP for two thousand years.
The hardest part is people
The hardest part, of course, was the team’s reluctance to change anything. That happens almost every time, especially when change comes from outside. Here it was the main investor who decided to bring in an ERP, and after that decision I had to get the director and twenty more people interested in it. Without their help, building a system, let alone rolling it out in a working business, is very, very hard.
In essence, you have to make everyone involved your ally: understand what each person needs, and either solve their problem or explain how it can be solved another way. And then, onwards.
How I described the company
At the requirements and architecture stage, chat history exports and a process map helped a lot. I usually talk to people in two rounds. First I ask them how things work today and describe the process in a clear form: flowcharts and algorithms. Then I check that description with everyone. The result is a full description of the company as it is (AS IS).
Once you have the AS IS, you can see where the bottlenecks are, what needs checking and what data is missing to build the model of how things should be (TO BE). The first, architectural stage took about a month. It ended with a clear specification, a defined result and a cost estimate.
What came out of it
Development took about two months and rollout another two. The company got its own ERP: shop, rentals, theft control and management of a bike’s whole life, from purchase in China and assembly to rental, repair and being taken apart for spares. Five months after we started, the owner could finally see what was happening in the company in real time.
What’s next
The last stage was a system for strategic decisions, and it had time to give a first result. When someone suspected that a new location was simply pulling customers from the main one, checking the database took one meeting: 12 of the 15 customers at the new location had never rented a bike at the main one. The location stayed open.