Tag: Test Environment

ERP Disaster Recovery

ERP Disaster Recovery

One of the most critical plans you can make is to prepare for the worst, especially when it comes to your enterprise software system and the database of all of the company’s critical information. A proper disaster recovery plan is essential, if you are running an ERP system, as it touches all aspects of the company. The plan can be as simple as a backup and recovery strategy, or as extensive as a global hot site fail-over plan. In either case, you need to prepare and test your plan.
ERP disaster recovery
Testing the plan is often where people fail. You often plan for the eventuality of a hard drive crash (and thus you use a RAID array), or you plan for the possibility of natural disaster, but what if you have a hidden hardware problem that is corrupting the database a little at a time?

That happened with one company we worked with. A failing motherboard caused problems with the email virus scanner, which in turn corrupted the email store a little at a time, so that it was unrecoverable. What do you do then? Well, in that case it was restore to the point in time that the email store database was usable. So the net impact was a few weeks of data loss. That is one illustration, but what happens if something like that occurs in your ERP database? Again the key is backups.

If backups are so critical, then why do people choose not to bother with testing and restoring them? This is a key concept in ERP Disaster Recovery. Many people happily back up night after night, but never try to restore a data file or much less a database. Is it too expensive to have a test server? The real question is it too expensive to not have your ERP data after a disaster? What is the company worth? Millions? A few thousand dollars for a test environment seems like a reasonable investment.

Key ERP Disaster Recovery Priorities

Here are some of the things you need to think through when planning for ERP Disaster Recovery:

1. Backups and Recovery procedures
2. Off-site storage of backup media
3. Security of backup media
4. Remote site backups (In a disaster, can you get the business up if the server site is destroyed?)
5. Personnel (In a disaster, can the right people be there to recover?)
6. Priority levels and potential downtime acceptability
7. Costs

ERP Disaster Recovery Resources

There are some excellent disaster recovery resources on the web on this topic. One article that we liked was on making proper backups for your ERP system. We would suggest that you invest the time to learn more about this topic before it bites you. Remember that disaster always strikes at the most inconvenient time, so make the time now.

ERP Disaster Recovery ERP Disaster Recovery

ERP Implementation: Success Factors

By Andrew Karasev

As seeing large number of implementations in our case these are Microsoft Business Solutions Products: Great Plains, MS CRM, Navision we would like to give you our opinion on what should you consider to do to secure implementation success. These principles should work as for large corporation as well as for midsize and even small business. We will not be talking about old-wisdom, which you know from the college classes or business school about management and staff involvement into the decision making, brainstorming, etc. we’ll be ERP specific

* In-house Technical Expertise. Well, complication of computer networking and its security, plus the fact that SQL is now standard for the database platform (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, etc.), plus internet connection line and its support make it inevitable to have IT expertise in the company this might be the whole department or just coming or part time networking consultant. Our experience indicates that the lack of internal or always available onsite specialist decreases the chances of success dramatically. And the explanation should be simple to this fact. Nowadays ERP system requires minor or major customization, integration and reporting and all these steps in turn require patient coding and testing in the test environment or on the sample dataset/database

* Dedicated ERP Administrator. This is true that users could be trained and would know how to use the system. However typical ERP has its own life and somebody should assign new users, setup security roles for them, modify reports and makes custom reports available for the users, setup printers, try first to resolve the issue by looking at the techknowledge database, and so on. ERP Administrator doesn’t have to be IT guru she/he needs to be trained on how to administer the program and how to deal with technical support. Image for a moment that if you take out manager from the company even if all the employees have excellent training and used to work for the company numerous years you will still expect performance degradation. The same should be said about ERP system

* Expect Certain Number of Issues. IT industry is not yet mature and it is probably sad, but the reality, that even very experienced consultant, developer, programmer makes errors or your software environment has something that make the custom piece malfunction. When you see the consultant being persistent in resolving your issues please be patient and try to help him or just don not make him nervous.

* Trust Your Consultant. When you decide on somebody to implement the system, you need from this moment on to trust him and let him have high security access to the ERP hosting server. Complex security makes consultant suffer from getting connected, installing the patches or custom pieces. So many times we were spinning our wheels in trying to test new custom business logic, when, say Windows or MS SQL Server security was restricting us to do the actions we needed

* Do Not Overnegotiate. This is from the sales cycle. When you purchase the system you should purchase the software and implementation from the same company otherwise your partner will place you on the second priority list. We saw numerous examples, when client purchases Microsoft CRM licenses from nation-wide distributor, and then is trying to find somebody to implement the system. Also if you are cutting software prices you may see your consulting company rescheduling the work for you in favor of somebody else.

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – Microsoft Business Solutions and IBM Lotus Domino Partner, serving corporate customers in the following industries: Aerospace & Defense, Medical & Healthcare, Distribution & Logistics, Wholesale & Retail, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Placement & Recruiting, Advertising & Publishing, Textile, Pharmaceutical, Non-Profit, Beverages, Conglomerates, Apparels, Durables, Manufacturing and having locations in multiple states and internationally.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

ERP Failures