Let’s walk through RPI’s offering for a pre-planning engagement. It's a highly structured four-to-eight week engagement, meaning that we know what meetings we need to hold, we know the amount of time they will require, and we have the right plan coming into the pre-planning engagement. This way, someone working with RPI throughout this exercise will know the time and resources they will need to dedicate to the workshops, as well as what outcomes can be expected at the end.

The pre-planning period consists of workshops, stakeholder meetings, and currency discovery, meaning it offers some very high-level design consideration in terms of what the business is looking to get out of CloudSuite. Once you start identifying some of the big-ticket items that need to be focal points within the project, you can begin to draw up a roadmap for success; however, this step is highly dependent on client availability. As the selection phase for an implementation partner begins, clients usually find this roadmap and a handful of other artifacts gathered during this time very useful.

While we have a default set of deliverables that we always put together, we can also work with any organization to provide customized deliverables to meet their needs. This works for just HCM, just FSM, both, or any mix of suites or applications. I feel that RPI’s v11 pre-planning engagement is a great little offering that delivers tremendous value for its input, and our track record with it has shown some great successes for our clients.

In the past, we have presented it as a set of tools and a methodology that an organization could take on by themselves. For the right organization, I stand by that belief and am happy to talk further about this possibility, especially if anybody is looking for advice on leading such an engagement and would like our guidance, or maybe auditing of its results.

About the Authors

Keith Wayland

Managing Partner, RPI Consultants

Keith is the Managing Partner of RPI and is certified on Infor Cloud Suite Financials and Supply Chain. He has been working with Infor & Lawson customers for 20+ years and his passion is helping leaders develop strategies to optimize their use of the software. Keith leads and sets the direction for RPI – he is a driving force every day of our customer centric strategy as well as pushing our team to be thought leaders. He “leads from the front” by being a common presenter and the master of ceremonies of most of our webcasts or as we say our “carnival barker”. Keith also interacts daily with customer and Infor executives to promote the positive forward movement of our industry, community, and customers.

Richard Leigh Stout

Partner, Infor Practice Leader, RPI Consultants

Richard has been sharing his passion for helping clients implement optimized Infor solutions for more than 15 years. As an RPI partner and head of the Infor practice, he is widely known throughout the Infor community as a though leader in the space as well as one of the foremost figures in designing, developing, and optimizing successful ERP architectures leveraging the Infor solution. In addition to helping clients achieve their immediate and long-term goals, Richard focuses on educating the wider community on best practices, optimizing solutions, and moving organizations to their next level.