Picture the accounting manager of a mid-sized manufacturing company. After months of installation, training, and testing, the ERP system finally goes live. Everyone sits down at their workstations that first morning with a mix of excitement and nerves. By afternoon, the phone starts ringing: ‘I can not print an invoice’, ‘Stock quantities look wrong’, ‘Can we just switch back to the old program?’ This scene plays out in company after company. Go-live day is not the finish line. It is the starting gun.
The first 90 days reveal whether the software will actually take root in the business or slowly get abandoned. The biggest danger in this window is panic. The moment a problem surfaces, everyone wants to go back to the old system. The owner pushes, the bookkeepers resist, the sales team complains. If management gives in to that pressure, the entire investment goes to waste. That is why the first 90 days need a plan. Running this period without one is like steering a ship without a rudder.
The first step in that plan is setting up a help desk. A help desk, meaning a single point where problems are reported and tracked, can be one person if that is all the company has. What matters is that the role is clearly defined and that person knows the software well, ideally someone who was involved in the implementation project. Users bring their problems to this person instead of calling the software vendor directly. When everyone phones the vendor separately, the same issue gets reported multiple times and nothing gets resolved efficiently. One clear channel keeps things orderly and speeds up resolution.
The second step is prioritising errors. Not every problem carries the same urgency. If invoices cannot be issued or payments cannot be processed, the business stops moving. These are first-priority issues and must be resolved the same day. If a report column is in the wrong order or a field label looks odd, that can wait. Calling everything ‘urgent’ means the genuinely urgent problems get buried in noise. A simple paper log works fine: problem description, priority level, responsible person, target resolution date. Keeping that log updated every day is not optional.
The third step is a daily status meeting. Keep it short and focused, no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Holding it first thing in the morning sets the direction for the day. The meeting covers only three questions: what problems came up yesterday, what needs to happen today, and who needs support from someone else. It is easy to dismiss these meetings as a waste of time and skip them. But when they are skipped, each department struggles with its own problems in isolation, coordination breaks down, and weeks later you discover that the same bug was being worked around separately in three different offices.
The most critical challenge is managing pressure to revert to the old system. A few days after go-live, someone will say: ‘This used to take five minutes in the old program and now it takes half an hour.’ That is true. Everyone is slower on a new system because the habits are different. But that slowness is temporary. Ask that person how long they used the old program before they felt comfortable. The new system deserves at least a few months before any fair comparison can be made. The manager’s job here is to draw a firm line: the old system is closed and there is no going back. Without that resolve, users will retreat to old habits every time they hit a difficulty, and the new software never gets a real chance.
What should a business realistically expect at the end of 90 days? Not perfection. The goal is for core operations to run without interruption. If invoices are being issued, stock is being tracked, and payments are being recorded, the system has taken hold. Small gaps and minor issues will still exist after three months; they get resolved over time. For a small or medium-sized business owner, the real question is this: has the team learned to work with the program, or are they still fighting it? If staff are using the system daily and trying to solve problems within it rather than around it, the 90-day window has been cleared successfully. A help desk, a priority log, and a short daily meeting are the three tools that make that outcome possible.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on July 1, 2002 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.