Systems Implementation Consultant: What Do They Do & How Do They Help Your Business?

In today’s increasingly competitive and ever-shifting market, it’s essential to implement scalable, sustainable technology solutions in order to make things easier for your employees and customers, save time and cut down on overhead costs – all while continuing to drive innovation. 

Failing to successfully implement the proper technology solutions means a failure to modernize and mitigate costly risks, a loss of time, revenue and competitive advantage, and more — and unfortunately, understanding which solutions will work best for your unique company needs and conducting a successful integration is no easy feat. 

That’s why if you’re considering a tech upgrade, it can be beneficial to turn to a systems implementation consultant for guidance.

What is Systems Implementation?

Systems implementation is the process of designing and integrating a technology system (such as an application or cloud-based software) in order to improve current business processes and configurations to help make things operate more smoothly for your employees, customers, and stakeholders.

Systems Implementation activities:

• Assessment: Assessing your business, process and team to ensure implementation readiness
• Installation: Working across teams to install new applications, software, and processes
• Oversight: Monitoring implementation and reworking as needed
• Expansion & Scaling: Integrating additional supporting technologies

What does a Systems Implementation consultant do?

An implementation consultant’s main goal is to guide you throughout your implementation, including assessing your business to ensure implementation readiness, analyzing business processes for potential risks, and identifying which technology solutions are the best fit for your unique company needs.

Skills of Systems Implementation consultants:

• Collaborating across teams to ensure proper implementation and understanding of new processes and technology
• Documenting processes and operational procedures
• Customizing technology solutions to fit client’s unique needs
• Conducting testing of applications and processes
• Developing a roadmap of your proposed systems adoption strategy 
• Managing, optimizing and scaling your deployment with ongoing, hands-on support and recommendations for additional supporting technologies  
• Conducting IV&V (independent validation and verification)
• Designing infrastructures and conducting data migration

When should you hire a Systems Implementation consultant?

Hiring a systems implementation consultant is instrumental in executing a seamless integration and ensuring your people have a proper understanding of how to use your new technology solutions. Without one, you can run into a number of problems — time and money wasted being just one of many.

How can a Systems Implementation consultant help your business?

• Enhancing operational processes and improving employee performance
• Reducing overhead costs as processes are automated
• Developing greater company alignment and organization
• Allowing for easy and accurate gathering of important company data
• Streamlining communication with employees, clients, and stakeholders
• Modernizing and distinguishing your business from competitors
• Offering real-time visibility into company ongoings

Types of projects Systems Implementation consultants work on, plus examples:

Systems implementation consultants work on a multitude of different projects, including everything from working with key executives to understand key business drivers to offering post-implementation support and guidance.

Let’s take a look into one of the Bridgepoint Consulting team’s previous experiences as an example of the type of projects systems implementation consultants are often tasked with. For a more detailed look, please head to our systems implementation case study.

After experiencing rapid business growth, a client outgrew the functionality and capabilities of its existing SAGE ERP application and decided to implement a new system.

Our consultant helped the client overcome earlier implementation setbacks and enabled the company to fully integrate its e-commerce web-store, automate back-office processes, and integrate inventory management and fulfillment solutions.

As you can see, systems implementation consultants work on many different types of projects — but the bottom line is that they’re instrumental in making the implementation process go as smoothly as possible while setting your business up for future success.