By:  Mr. Prashant Shirgur, Senior Solutions Architect - Enterprise Application Services, Patni

Organizations running ERP systems as their backbone applications incur sizeable efforts and investments in implementation and provisioning ongoing support and developments. With an aim of reduced operational cost structure and continual improvements in processes along with seeking gains in operational efficiency, organizations often outsource operational support and development services to partners in low-cost economies. Very often these partners are not involved in the initial implementation and/or rollout services. The need to transition knowledge and services to the incoming vendor imposes dual costs to organizations with the existing team (more often implementation team) and the incoming vendor teams involved jointly in the transition process. Situations where the implementation that has freshly gone live and is going through a stabilization phase adds risk to customers who are trying to (a) balance speed of stabilization, (b) initiate service benchmarks, (c) contain dual costs of running the operations and those incurred during transition.