A Conference Room Pilot (CRP) is a structured testing session where the project team runs a newly configured ERP or business system through real-world scenarios, using representative sample data, before it goes live. Key users gather in one room, work through their day-to-day processes end to end, and confirm the system fits the way the business actually operates.
The purpose is to catch process gaps, configuration errors, and missing requirements while they are still cheap to fix. A CRP normally runs across several rounds (often called CRP1, CRP2, and CRP3), each closer to the finished setup, and it takes place well before user acceptance testing (UAT) and go-live.
In this blog post, we will tell you what a conference room pilot is, its importance, 3 phases, key factors, and components of objectives.
We will also discuss an example of CRP and a CRP checklist to help you ensure your enterprise software project implementation goes well.
What is CRP?
A Conference Room Pilot (CRP) is a structured test where the project team runs real business scenarios through a configured version of a new system, in a room, before it goes live. The point is to prove the system can handle the organization’s actual processes and to surface gaps while they are still cheap to fix.
It is usually run in rounds, commonly called CRP1, CRP2, and CRP3, each more complete than the last, with end users working through their own day-to-day tasks rather than watching a demo. That hands-on validation is what separates a CRP from a sales walkthrough, and it produces a punch list of configuration and process fixes to close before go-live.
How a Conference Room Pilot Works
A CRP is run as a series of working sessions, not a single meeting. The project team strings individual transactions together into complete, end-to-end business scenarios and walks key users through them in the configured system. Instead of checking one screen in isolation, everyone follows a whole process from start to finish.
Take a typical order-to-cash scenario. It starts by creating a customer, then raising a sales order, checking stock, picking and shipping the goods, raising the invoice, and finally recording the payment. Running the flow this way exposes the handoffs between departments, which is exactly where most configuration gaps hide.
CRP rounds: CRP1, CRP2, and CRP3
Most ERP projects run the pilot in more than one round, each at a higher level of fidelity than the last:
- CRP1 proves the core processes work in a baseline configuration, using a small set of sample data.
- CRP2 brings in the company’s own data, custom fields, and integrations, and tests the harder edge cases and exceptions.
- CRP3 is a near-final dress rehearsal of the complete solution, including reports and security roles, and feeds directly into UAT.
These rounds map onto the Scope, Design, and Build phases covered below: Scope sets what each round must prove, Design turns the requirements into a working configuration, and Build hardens it into something ready to test for real.
Who takes part in a CRP
Planning is usually shared between the project manager, the solution architect, and the QA lead. Functional and technical consultants prepare the environment and load the data, while the sessions themselves are driven by business process owners and subject matter experts, the people who will use the system every day, with consultants on hand to answer questions and log issues.
Three Phases of Conference Room Pilot
- Scope
- Design
- Build
Scope CRP
Here, you finalize the project’s scope being designed with a final statement on the project’s requirements.
Design CRP
Here, the requirements are being transferred to proof of the design. A team with technical and functional expertise starts designing a project.
In this case, an adequately prepared CRP would validate that you understood the key elements of the business scope and were aptly able to transfer them into an efficient design.
Build CRP
In this final phase, the experts start to build the application. The goal is to translate the design elements developed into a fully functional application.
Therefore, a live demo is essential during this phase, as it helps identify any issues and allows the total participation of the team members.
Setting up a conference room pilot is very important because the results can lead to system loopholes that the company must address before the new system goes live.
A gap caught in a conference room costs a fraction of the same gap caught after go-live, where it can mean corrupted data, blocked transactions, and users quietly building workarounds. That cost curve is the whole reason CRP exists: fix the configuration and process issues while they are still notes on a whiteboard.
Key Factors for Successful CRP
1. Organizing and planning
CRP would help if you define the following things.
- Objectives: Define reasonable goals and write them down. Make sure that objectives are excellent and clear. Then, select the CRP objectives to support the company’s objectives.
- Organizing: Determine the responsible person for conducting the procedure and acting upon outputs. Transparently define the role of each member who participates in CRP and ensures the involvement of vendors and consultants.
- Scope: Clearly state the crucial things to be involved in your CRP. Determine the applications, after-effects on the organization, and desired involvement. Clearly say whether you will change the complete process by eliminating the non-profitable process or if you plan to modify the current approach.
- Tools and methods: Define the methods and tools used during the CRP process.
- Planning: Make a plan to act as an effective project management tool. Define the responsibilities, supporting activities, milestones, dates, durations, and resource requirements (equipment, people, and external support). Each application area has its milestones, activity plans, and responsible persons.
2. Requirements and documentation
Requirements and documentation are easy to skip under time pressure, but they anchor the pilot. Writing down what each process must do keeps the CRP focused on business outcomes rather than technical detail, gives the team a shared reference to test against, and captures the decisions made in each round so they are not lost between sessions.
A documented foundation also keeps the pilot anchored to the organization’s own goals, rather than being steered by a vendor or a single loud stakeholder with a different agenda.
When transitioning to a new system, it’s vital to remember the prior deployment. This involves understanding both your aim and where you come from. Therefore, having comprehensive and detailed documentation is essential when replacing the old system with an updated platform.
It is also necessary to learn how the latest configuration works and what problems and issues arise while working with it. So, it is better to list out the detailed “to-be” definition. It will be helpful as the process moves forward.
Companies might believe that their current system is logical and reasonable, but in actuality, it falls short of that expectation. Consequently, there will be numerous expectations and various alternative activities.
Moreover, many organizations do not uniformly address emerging issues. Notably, instances like customer returns and external processing exemplify this inconsistency.
Conventional documentation tools struggle to effectively manage these elements. Employing the “flow chart” method for documentation is more advantageous than relying on documentation containing intricate and laborious diagrams.
How do you deal with these risks?
- First, determine an excellent, balanced, and qualified team. Then, educate them about modern system approaches and make them study applications well. Then, explain to them about methods used by many successful companies. After that, explain clearly the structure of the documentation.
- Set a clear aim for the documentation, such as cutting paperwork or shortening a process cycle time, and make it specific enough to measure. A concrete target keeps the team focused and gives the effort a measurable return.
- Put the flow charts on the wall with visible size and connect them with visible arrows. Note the cycle time, responsibilities, and applicable procedures for all processes. Then, explain what is to be done, why, and how to be done.
- Get reviews and suggestions from all departments, customers, and government officials to improve it.
- Let them write their suggestions on a small notepad with the date so the project team members can record, classify, and edit them on the issues list. Then, when it gets documented, discuss the issue and actions and list them on the “to-be” list.
- Make the team more creative by challenging them to reduce the cycle time and administrative paperwork.
3. Administration
The administration is an essential factor for a successful CRP. Therefore, assign an administrator to impart a focal point for all activities of the conference room pilot.
Administrators should plan the CRP, including scheduling, task assignment, monitoring, follow-up, and process & documentation standards. These things help to keep the process on track and within the budget.
Administrator responsibilities
- Monitoring the process and making sure that the process is going as per the predetermined plan.
- Monitoring the parameters such as costing methods, defaults, exception reporting rules, posting rules, etc
- Maintaining the following database.
- Training database – used for official and unofficial instructions
- CRP database – used for structured business testing
- Play database – used for free or paid experimentation
- Production database, the live database the organization runs the software on after go-live.
- Maintaining the archives of the CRP database.
Sometimes, a CRP database is required to maintain the parameters of project management instructions.
For example, if the functional leader instructs the administrator to change the parameter, the administrator discusses and reviews the impact of changing the parameter with his team.
These changes were examined in CRP and eventually moved to the other database.
4. Equipment and provisions
Proper equipment and facilities are essential for a successful CRP. In addition, they help to improve the results and decrease costs.
The organization should provide sufficient space to gather the team and allow them to perform wall chart activities, training activities, and simulation testing.
Many workstations and printers are also required for effective interaction and efficient performance. Therefore, the organization should provide these.
5. Technical support
The organization should provide the required technical support to conduct CRP. Provide all the above databases and frequently take up the backups.
Keep supporting the team technically by providing restoring capabilities, equipment, and service support.
6. Operational stage
Following are some excellent ways to organize the CRP activities.
- Functional leaders construct the “to-be” flows and find out the issues.
- The team works on assignments and priorities and solves the finding issues.
- The administrator does an official trial of flow charts to guide the written scenarios and gives all CRP plans, schedules, and scenario guidelines.
Based on guidelines, functional leaders build functional scenarios and list the issues and suggestions from system users and managers.
They work on flow charts and discuss the issue handling. Finally, leaders involve the team through an online scenario trial.
When doing scenario exercises, many questions and problems may come up. This phase will help solve many of those issues.
Before this stage, taking up vendor software training and industry-specific education is better.
It is better to solve the problems on paper before going for a computer simulation because reloading the database, resetting the parameters, and re-doing the trial is tedious and a waste of time.
7. Configuration
It is crucial to record the results, problems, and solutions.
Components of Objectives in a CRP
- To determine the preferred design of workflow.
- To identify gaps and loopholes in the simulation steps and rectify them for the most efficient performance between the new and the old software.
- To estimate the effects of changes on specific departments or individuals.
- To identify the lack of staff training requirements, if any.
- To determine the overall standard of the software being tested for, during, or before the implementation.
- To outline the strengths and weaknesses of the ERP program to be implemented.
- To map the data cleaning, converting, and reconciling process.
What is the Importance of CRP?
CRP is essential to implementing a project.
- It allows the members of project teams to do end-to-end process practice and yields feedback.
- It helps the team with reliability to test the system even if it is in development.
- It helps to improve the team’s confidence.
- It gives a chance to employees to get hands-on experience.
Conference Room Pilot Example
We consider software put forward by a digital health provider installed in a hospital. The best way to test whether it holds to the company policies is to build a simulator as close to the live clinical setup as possible and allow the customers to have a hands-on experience with a free demo.
In a hospital environment, the sets and subsets of components involved in a CRP can be considered the subset of beds or the subsets of nurses.
It will be an entire digitalization of the hospital components, easily monitored by looking thoroughly over the implemented software.
Here, CRP can be implemented for the hospital staff to see whether the software works according to their needs.
Conference Room Pilot Checklist
- Make out employee attendance: Establish a good attendance list and custom build the CRP training to improve employee skills and users’ needs to ensure each employee is in the meeting.
- Define and communicate objectives: Before discussing the technical aspects, it is necessary to introduce them. Clearly define the number of sessions and pilots covered in that session and let the employees know about this. Make sure of total attendance in all sessions.
- Put in real data: Use actual data for better understanding in the pilot. It helps the employees to understand how the implementing software relates to their role.
- Invite project supporters: During sessions, invite them to get their ideas and suggestions.
- Give time for conversations: Let the employees ask their questions and doubts. If no one is ready to ask questions, the person taking the session must ask questions. It is good to get feedback.
- Set the proper timings for the session: Set the convenient time to take sessions so that the maximum number of participants can attend the session.
- Review the results: Keep track of topics discussed during sessions by documentation. After that, generate the final report that must include the following things.
- The outcomes of the conference room pilot
- The issues registered
- The list of software that fulfills your organization’s requirements
A specific CRP should be implemented for every step to understand conference room pilot best practices. This will ensure that everyone involved understands what is happening at each stage.
A conference room pilot session should be organized during the middle phase of every step and should not be left at the end of the session.
Conference Room Pilot (CRP) vs. UAT
A conference room pilot and user acceptance testing are both ways of checking that new software works for the business, but they sit at different points in a project and answer different questions. The CRP comes first and is iterative: the project team walks key users through the configured system using representative sample data, usually across more than one round (often called CRP1, CRP2 and CRP3), to confirm the setup fits real workflows and to catch gaps while there is still time to change the design. UAT happens much later, just before go-live, with real data and the actual end users running their own day-to-day tasks. By then the build is meant to be stable, so UAT is a final sign-off, a gatekeeper for go-live rather than a place to rework the system. A simple way to remember it: you run several CRPs to shape the solution, then one UAT to approve it.
| Conference Room Pilot (CRP) | User Acceptance Testing (UAT) | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Validate configuration and fit, surface gaps | Final acceptance / sign-off before go-live |
| When | Early and mid-project | Late, just before go-live |
| Rounds | Multiple (CRP1, CRP2, CRP3) | Usually one |
| Data | Representative sample data | Real / production-like data |
| Who runs it | Project team with key/power users | Actual end users / the business |
| Nature | Iterative, changes expected | Gatekeeper, no major changes expected |
| Outcome | Refined design and resolved gaps | Go / no-go decision |
Based on standard ERP implementation practice (Stoneridge Software; Domain Systems).
Conference Room Pilot Project Plan
Most published CRP guidance stops at the soft advice: invite the right people, use real data, leave time for questions. The part that decides whether a pilot is useful is the schedule and the gates, and almost nobody writes that down. Pemeco Consulting, which runs these for a living, budgets two weeks per CRP phase, occasionally three. The plan below fits that window for a single round.
A two week plan for one CRP round
| Days | What happens | Who owns it | What you should have at the end |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 | Freeze the configuration for this round and load the data set. Nothing gets changed in the environment once the room opens, or you cannot tell what the users actually tested. | Functional and technical consultants | A named, frozen build plus a data set the business agrees is representative |
| 3 to 4 | Write the scripts and dry run them. Pemeco’s rule is that each scenario is translated into user instructions detailed to the session and field level, not a one line description. | Process leads with the QA lead | Scripts for every in scope scenario, and the defects the dry run already found |
| 5 to 7 | Run the sessions, one process stream at a time. Concentrate on what Pemeco calls the 80% scenarios, the high probability everyday cases, rather than the exotic exceptions. | Business process owners and subject matter experts | A walked, signed off script per scenario and a raw issue log |
| 8 | Run the end to end trace: follow a single transaction through every department that touches it, from order to cash or purchase to pay. | Whole team | Proof the handoffs work, which single department testing never gives you |
| 9 to 10 | Triage. Every item on the log gets a category, an owner and a decision before the round is declared closed. | Project manager and solution architect | A closed log, a scope decision list and the entry conditions for the next round |
Entry and exit criteria that actually matter
No ERP vendor publishes a standard set of CRP entry and exit criteria, and the checklists that circulate online are usually lifted from user acceptance testing, where the purpose is the opposite: UAT is a gate that assumes the build is finished, while a CRP assumes it is not. Rather than borrow the wrong gates, judge a round on these.
Before the room opens: the configuration is frozen and version stamped; the data is loaded and reconciled against a source the business trusts; a script exists for every scenario in scope; and the named process owners have actually confirmed they will be there. A round that starts without the fourth one turns into a demonstration.
Before the round is declared closed: every in scope scenario has been walked end to end rather than merely opened; every gap has an owner and one of four decisions recorded against it; nothing is still blocked by an unresolved showstopper; and the cross department trace has completed cleanly at least once. If a scenario was skipped for time, it is an open item, not a pass.
Sorting what the pilot finds
The most common way a CRP goes wrong after the sessions is that everything raised in the room gets logged as a defect and thrown at the implementation partner. In a pilot, most findings are not defects at all, and sorting them is what turns an issue log into a plan:
- Configuration gap. The system can do it, it is simply set up wrong. Fix it inside the round if the change is small enough not to invalidate what has already been walked.
- Process gap. The system is right and the documented process is wrong. Change the process, not the software. This is the category people are most reluctant to use and the one that saves the most money.
- Requirement miss. Nobody asked for it during design. It is real, but it costs scope, so it goes to whoever owns the budget rather than being absorbed quietly.
- True defect. The software does not do what the vendor says it does. This is the only bucket that belongs with the vendor, and on most projects it is the smallest of the four.
What Software Do You Need to Run a CRP?
There is no product category called CRP software, and any tool marketed that way is really something else with a CRP label on it. A conference room pilot is a phase of an implementation, not an application you buy. What you need is a short list, and you almost certainly own all of it already:
- A non production instance of the ERP itself. A sandbox or test environment that can be frozen for the duration of the round and refreshed between rounds.
- A representative data set. Real master data wherever the business will let you use it, because users spot problems in their own part numbers and customer names that they will never spot in sample records.
- Somewhere to hold the scripts. A shared spreadsheet is enough on a small project. Larger programmes use whatever test management tool the partner already runs.
- An issue log with owners and status. The one thing that genuinely must not live in someone’s notebook.
Screen recording the sessions is optional and worth it. When a gap is disputed three weeks later, the recording settles it faster than anyone’s memory of the room.
CRP in ERP: Two Different Things
If you have arrived here after seeing CRP in an ERP system and the description did not match, this is why. The abbreviation is used for two unrelated things in the same software:
- Conference Room Pilot, the implementation phase described on this page. It involves people, sessions, scripts and a project schedule.
- Capacity Requirements Planning, an MRP II calculation that works out whether your work centres have the capacity to meet the production schedule. It involves routings, work centre load and hours.
Context tells you which one immediately. If the discussion is about go live, sessions, key users or sign off, it is the conference room pilot. If it is about work centres, routings, load against available hours or an MRP run, it is capacity requirements planning. A menu item or report called CRP inside a planning or manufacturing module is almost always capacity requirements planning, because the conference room pilot is a project activity and never ships as a screen in the product.
FAQs
What happens in Conference Room Pilot?
It validates the new systems and allows end-users to have hands-on experience before implementing the new system. The system is a software application for improving business processes in most cases.
What is the difference between CRP and UAT?
UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and CRP (Conference Room Pilot) are two distinct phases in the software development lifecycle, both involving testing but at different stages and for different purposes.
User Acceptance Testing
UAT is typically the final phase of testing before the software or application is released to the end users.
It involves testing the system by the end-users themselves or representatives of the end-users to ensure that the system meets their requirements and functions as expected in a real-world environment.
Its primary focus is on validating if the software/application meets business needs, and user requirements, and is fit for use.
Conference Room Pilot
CRP, on the other hand, is a pre-UAT phase often associated with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software implementations.
It involves testing the system in a simulated or controlled environment, usually within a conference room setting. This phase helps stakeholders or key users get familiar with the software, understand its functionalities, and validate whether it aligns with business processes.
CRP aims to identify potential issues, refine processes, and ensure that the system meets initial expectations before moving on to UAT.
Conclusion
CRP is a tool that can help you and your team plan more effectively. It will ensure you don’t miss anything important and also helps reduce stress because there’s no guessing or lost work due to miscommunication.
Businesses can use conference Room Pilots in business development, customer service, sales training, etc. Your CRP objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable/Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART).
Additionally, you’ll need an action plan for each goal with milestones and deadlines before the meeting. This will help ensure that there is no need to create them on the fly during the conference room session.
We hope you find this helpful information when considering how best to incorporate these principles into your organization or project!