We saw how global companies are implementing ERP systems across their departments and across their international offices where thousands of employees within the company use the same ERP.
But what if the company needs to change ERP vendor or make a major change ?
For such cases, boards have to deal with the tedious phase of change management where the whole company go through a complex re-organization of the culture of work.
Therefore, global organizations implementing ERP software need to include the following five components to succeed the transition:
- Project champion: While employees usually report to the headquarters, their allegiance lies where their leadership resides. So the company need to have local project champions to push toward the acceptance of the new ERP in every big office around the world.
- Cultural considerations: Language, education and demographic differences have a significant impact on how employees perceive and understand goals, objectives, risks and benefits of an ERP project.
- Employee engagement: The adoption of the new ERP system needs to be a clear objective for the whole organization. Employees need to be involved by quantifying the impact of such important decisions.
- Communications: Communication within a global ERP project is absolutely vital but incredibly difficult. Most employees would like to hear updates about the project from their manager during team meetings [1].
- Training: Change management plans must be devised in order to address workforce transition to the new ERP system and who will be super-users and trainers. A comprehensive training strategy is needed [1].