Busting barriers and breaking silos: How to tackle common cloud ERP migration hurdles

As digital transformation accelerates, many large companies continue to rely on outdated and ineffective strategies for cloud ERP implementations, leading to misaligned goals and missed opportunities. Sales, implementation, consulting, and support teams often struggle with alignment, with each team focusing on its own immediate priorities. This misalignment is part of a larger issue: The overall lack of alignment with customer goals and vision from the very beginning. Without clear communication and early collaboration, businesses risk costly delays and operational disruptions and ultimately fail to deliver long-term value. Cloud ERP transformations are now critical for businesses, offering real-time data insights, scalability, and continuous innovation. As a result, a more collaborative, industry-specific approach that delivers faster, more predictable results is essential for long-term success.

The problem with traditional ERP migrations

Traditional ERP projects often follow a predictable yet flawed path. Once the contract is signed, the sales team moves on, leaving the delivery team to pick up the project without sufficient understanding of the customer’s challenges and business goals. Because no one from the implementation or customer success teams is engaged during these initial discussions, critical information is frequently lost in the handoff.

After the initial deployment, customer success and support typically engage only sporadically, often focusing on upsell opportunities rather than proactively ensuring long-term value. Furthermore, many businesses find themselves stuck in an extended stabilization phase post-deployment, preventing them from leveraging the full potential of their ERP system. This fragmented, siloed approach leads to miscommunication, misalignment, and missed opportunities for sustained business success.
To avoid this, vendors must adopt an approach that ensures customers can move beyond stabilization quickly, with clear strategies for optimizing and evolving their systems to meet changing business demands.

Finally, many customers struggle to access the deep industry-specific knowledge needed to tailor their cloud ERP systems effectively. Without this expertise, companies often face misaligned solutions that fail to address their unique challenges, leading to delays, increased costs, and missed opportunities for long-term value.

These challenges often lead to the following negative consequences:

• Siloed teams and processes: Without collaboration between sales, delivery, success, and support, teams fail to align on long-term success.
• Generic, non-industry-specific solutions: Many ERP solutions require extensive customization, which adds risk, time, and cost to the project.
• Short-term focus: While deal closure is important, prioritizing immediate wins often undermines continuity and long-term value for both clients and vendors.
• Operational disruption and budget overruns: Miscommunication and lack of transparency often result in delayed timelines, inflated budgets, unwelcome surprises, and unrealized goals.
• Underestimated total cost of ownership (TCO): Many businesses face unplanned costs due to the need for additional staffing and support to manage and maintain ERP systems.
• Reactive support: Traditional ERP support is often reactive, waiting for problems to arise instead of pre-empting issues before they become costly.

According to McKinsey, 75% of cloud migration projects go over budget, and 38% are behind schedule.¹ In an industry where misaligned goals and siloed operations persist, the need for change is clear.

A new approach: Reimagining cloud ERP transformations

To truly transform cloud ERP migrations, companies need to adopt a model that aligns all stakeholders from the start, fosters continuous engagement throughout, and proactively addresses potential issues before they arise.

Here’s what an ideal approach would look like:

• Breaking down silos: Ensure that sales, implementation, and customer success teams are aligned from the beginning. Such collaboration would prevent miscommunication and handoff issues that often derail traditional implementations. By maintaining a unified focus, teams can work together to achieve long-term goals, rather than just short-term wins.
• Preconfigured, industry-specific solutions: Leverage preconfigured solutions and business processes tailored to specific industries. Prioritizing standardized implementations over excessive customizations reduces the complexity, risk, and time required for deployment. These solutions incorporate industry best practices from the outset, ensuring the ERP system is optimized for the specific needs and challenges of each industry. This approach accelerates deployment, fosters quicker adoption, and delivers a faster return on investment (ROI).
• Holistic, continuous engagement: Maintain an ongoing dialogue with customers throughout the entire ERP lifecycle. This type of engagement methodology would begin even before the contract is signed and continue long after deployment. By staying connected, vendors can better adapt to evolving customer needs, ensuring that the solution effectively meets its initial goals—while also remaining relevant and effective over time. Such an approach would allow for continuous feedback loops, where insights gained during each phase are fed back into the process to improve future stages.
• Proactive problem solving: Shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset. Anticipating issues before they occur allows teams to address potential problems early, minimizing disruptions and keeping projects on track. This proactive stance includes regular risk assessments, scenario planning, and the use of predictive analytics to identify and mitigate potential challenges.
• Incremental, non-disruptive innovation: Cloud ERP transformations should evolve at the customer’s pace, ensuring that changes are incremental and non-disruptive. Innovation should go hand in hand with the deployment and optimization of core system capabilities, allowing businesses to adopt advancements gradually without overwhelming their operations. This balanced approach also allows businesses to customize and build on the platform to innovate in ways that provide a unique competitive edge.
• Continuous improvement beyond the initial launch: Simply moving to the cloud is not the end goal. Continuous improvement and ongoing innovation are essential to ensuring long-term success. A customer’s cloud ERP system should be flexible enough to adapt to their evolving business needs, allowing for ongoing optimization and enhancements that drive further value over time.
• Consistent access to expertise: Ensure customers have ongoing access to the knowledge and expertise needed throughout the entire ERP lifecycle. Consistent support helps guide businesses through each phase of the implementation, adoption, and optimization process, ensuring that they fully realize the value of their investment and avoid gaps in support or information.

Infor's commitment to Customer Success

At Infor, we believe that success begins from day one. Our commitment to customer success starts with early engagement, ensuring that every customer is set up for success from the very beginning. We don’t just focus on the implementation; we work alongside customers throughout their entire journey—designing the right solution before they sign and continuing our partnership long after deployment.

Our Customer Success approach is structured around these key pillars that guide customers through every phase of their transformation:

• Customer readiness: Infor's journey with customers begins with a focus on cloud readiness. Through our Engage Workshop, we assess each prospect’s readiness to migrate to the cloud, delivering an Industry Solution Score and a tailored roadmap. This “design before you sign” approach ensures transparency and alignment with both customer goals and budgets.
• Deployment: Infor’s Time to Value methodology offers a prescriptive, proven approach to deployment that is agile, predictable, and transparent. By leveraging preconfigured, industry-specific solutions and processes, we streamline deployment to help customers achieve faster time to value. With predefined steps and best practices, this methodology reduces complexity and risk while maintaining alignment with customer goals.
• Innovation adoption: Beyond deployment, Infor’s Global Advanced Services team helps customers unlock the full potential of their ERP systems by driving innovation and continuous improvement. This team provides specialized expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and process automation, helping customers optimize their processes and adopt cutting-edge technologies. Our phased, incremental service packages allow businesses to enhance ROI while keeping their operations running smoothly.
• Long-term value realization: Infor’s CareFor Success and CareFor Managed Services programs offer ongoing support and strategic guidance, ensuring that customers continue to achieve value long after deployment. With CareFor Success, customers receive proactive, strategic support to enhance and evolve their solutions as their business needs grow. For customers seeking more operational support, CareFor Managed Services provides additional resources to manage complex technical environments, allowing businesses to focus on what they do best.

Conclusion: Building for long-term success

Cloud ERP transformations are more than just a move to the cloud—they are a long-term journey toward continuous improvement and innovation. Infor’s Customer Success approach ensures that from day one, every step of this journey is guided by expert support, industry-specific best practices, and a commitment to long-term value realization.
By focusing on readiness, prescriptive deployment, and ongoing innovation adoption, Infor empowers customers to achieve not only their immediate goals but also sustainable, long-term success. Our holistic approach ensures that businesses not only reach the cloud but continue to evolve, optimize, and thrive as they grow.

Ready to transform your cloud ERP migration? Contact Infor today to begin your transformation journey and ensure your business stays ahead of the competition.

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¹ McKinsey & Company, Cloud-migration opportunity: Business value grows, but missteps abound, October 12, 2021.