Agile ERP: Agile Methodology Works and Creates Amazing Results

In May 2017, I received a request from Chris Freund, partner of Mekong Capital, that Ben Thanh Jewelry (BTJ) and its awesome brand Precita, an investee company of Mekong Enterprise Fund III, need some help on its ERP project. As I wanted to get to know Chris Freund more, I accepted to give him a hand on the BTJ project.

The first thing I wanted to do was to understand what the expectations of the project were. I attended some of the meetings and quickly recognized that there were many conversations around different systems. The BTJ team had done a great job on internally debating the requirements of each system but without looking at why we need those in BTJ and what we can do with it.

Also, the methodology that team was following was the Waterfall approach (a fancy word for a high-risk framework) that caused many requirements to be outdated because of the evolution of the business, such as expectations for the management dashboards. Besides, there were too many people involved in the project with many personal opinions on what vendor to pick. For example, some were in favor of Microsoft and other open source vendors. This debate was politicized and the Engineering team’s effort was also undermined. The Engineering team was reporting to the Finance department, which was responsible for this project. However, they had no opinion in this debate.

After this observation, I tried to transit the debate into a more Agile methodology (a fancy word for a low-risk framework) by empowering the Engineering team to request for such a transformation. They opened up a few more facts that they were holding back as a result of politicizing vendor selection. We also realized that we needed to move the Engineering team out of the Finance department and hold the Engineering team responsible for the digital transformation instead of the Finance department, as most of these systems were going to be used by the whole organization, not just the Finance department.

As a result, we managed to pick the vendors very quickly. Additionally, because of using the Agile methodology, we managed to roll out the new Point of Sale system to 10 stores within 3 weeks of implementation…which is an amazing achievement.

This experience taught me:

1. Agile can help to build higher quality products.
2. Agile can help to increase customer satisfaction with continuous improvement that is built in Agile.
3. Agile brings in ridiculous transparency which enables to make a progress in order to achieve results.
4. Agile eliminates the chances of failure.
5. Agile has much faster ROI (Return On Investment) with its built-in principles.