this year, japan branch of maersk logistics starts to implement SAP as their ERP system. which initially started in copenhagen, sweden, and hongkong (as the 1st batch - in 2006)
they faced a failure in the mapping process which brings the company to a state where everything needs to be done manually for the whole year
the second batch, south east asia, also experiencing the same problem
mapping process, as the initial stage of ERP implementation should be done by coordinating both business owner and IT consultant. however, due to limitation in resources, some companies such as this one decided to use their internal resources to do all the mapping to data validating
the result, none of the business process went through smoothly. in fact, inefficiency arise everywhere. cost went up while business stranded because of these backlog issues which eventually bring the level of productivity to lower than the previous years
long run, as in today, this shipping giant industry had to lay off more than 10.000 managers, as they see this issue as the incapability of decision making
thus, to avoid this kind of tragedy in the future, we better think twice before we decide to jump into something that we only know partly
1 comment:
hi atom, just read your posting now. my take on this is that ERP Implementation is a huge undertaking - organizations usually have 2 choices when implementing ERP: they either do a "Big Bang" Implementation or a modular implementation. If an organization lacks the documentation of their current systems/operations, then this should be done as a pre-requisite to an ERP Implementation. An ERP System is a suite of applications: Accounting, Inventory, Human Resource, etc ... since each application can run independently, these can be implemented one at a time, or in a modular approach. One critical factor of ERP Implementation is a clear delineation of tasks and ownership. ERP Implementation is an Organizational project, NOT an IT Project. This has to be made clear to stakeholders because most of the time, the organizations looks at projects such as this as an IT Project and thus, passes on the ownership of the project to IT. In most cases, IT Managers or heads simply accept this responsibility without arguing - IT is a project team member, at most a technical lead but the technical lead is supposed to have a partner, someone who knows and understand the business process in each category or ERP implementation.
Anyway, the point here is not to argue but just to let you know that the ERP Project Team Organization members have to be carefully chosen to ensure success of projects such as an ERP Implementation. If a Team was organized, they would have seen early on that the process mapping is an integral part of the project. Just my one cent :-)
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