Enterprise Resource Planning Change

Enterprise Resource Planning and Changehorizontal relationships between employees and
Managementenhancements in their communication abilities. You
What is Enterprise Resource Planning and why ERP issee how principle concepts of ERP involve wide
related to Change? At first we must make it clearchanges in the people side of the enterprise. New
that when we are talking about ERP, we mean thebusiness processes consequences with new
Enterprise Resource Planning solutions which are reallyorganizational roles and jobs descriptions for the
following the concepts and characteristics of ERP.employees. It may cause some changes in
Enterprise Resource Planning is not only a technologyorganizational chart due to adoption to the new
that automates the processes of the organizationsprocesses and job definitions. In addition the
but is a solution to run the business more efficienttechnology also is being changed. The reports and
and beneficial. That means implementing a world classdata forms of ERP makes differences in the ways of
Enterprise Resource Planning involves not only withdata movement as well as reporting in the
changes in the technical layer of the organization butorganization. On line access to required data for any
also changes in the mission layer of the organization.employee and computerized data flow requires the
This happens mainly due to the Best Practices whichpeople to change from paper based working to use
Enterprise Resource Planning solutions offer. Bestthe automated data. Trust to mechanized data is not
Practices refer to the business models which areso easy for the people who have been working in a
stored as work flow engine and the logic ofpaper based organization for a long time. This exactly
programs in ERP package. Such models are madeneeds change in habits and attitudes. Managers also
thorough benchmarking from the practices andmust get used to take managerial reports from the
business processes of the world class organizationssystem and spend their time for analyzing
and excellent enterprises. So when an organizationinformation.
uses such ERP solutions, in fact it employs theseConclusion As per the above we can easily conclude
Business reference models. Thus, Enterprise Resourcethat implementing and utilizing a world class ERP
Planning implementation is equivalent to running thesolution is tightly associated with managing people
business as per new processes and practices. On theside of change. In fact even if you setup ERP
other hand the employees of the organization shouldapplications correctly but the people side of change
change to work on a new practice. This exposesdoes not happen the company will not be working on
why ERP is tied with change in the organization andthe ERP practices and so it will not gain the expected
organizational change must be considered as abenefits. Further more Enterprise Resource Planning
consequence of such Enterprise Resource Planningimplementation regardless of changing the employees
implementation. What areas will undergo change? Thecan cause stoppage in your business. If you look at
change as told begins from the business processes.the failure stories you can see that many of ERP
This includes new way of doing works and functionsimplementations are failed after the software
to run the business. Furthermore change in theimplementation, due to organization was not capable
attitude to the organization tasks might becometo perform as per the ERP business processes and
necessary if the current habits of doing tasks haveits necessities. In the other world the employees did
significant gaps with the new processes.not adopted with these new practices. The major
For a very simple example if the employees currentlyreason is lack of a Change Management program.
are doing their dedicated tasks separately in theirIndeed implementing an ERP solution in addition to a
defined boundaries they must to change to work ontechnical project management needs a people side of
the basis of an interlocked chain of the tasks calledChange Management program. This Change
business processes. This is due to the primaryManagement will have its own scenario, activities and
feature of any Enterprise Resource Planning which isresponsible. We can say you must run two projects.
process oriented. This obviously needs a change inThe goal of the Change Management project is to
the attitude and behavior of the organization peoplemake the people ready for change and conduct
from a task oriented approach to process orientedthem to move to the new environment and map
approach. People concentration in such integratedthem to the new way of running business.
business must move from focusing on their separateWe have to know that Change Management tasks
jobs not being worried about the other parts, toare not the same even in one ERP project. That
taking care of the entire process and do what allmeans if you have selected Purchasing, HRMS ... of
they can to accomplish the entire process perfect.one Enterprise Resource Planning system, you have
Further more process integration also must happen.to do Change Management tasks regarding to
The business processes themselves are in relationspecific module. It means because employees in
together and each process might trigger otherdifferent departments do different tasks, thus we
processes to be launched. In this way team workingneed to do related Change Management activities
also makes sense and will get in to the scope. In facttoo.
teams are to be formed around the businessEnjoy your ERP and Change Management activities!
processes. Team work needs improvements in the