FREE online courses on Business Needs and ERP - BPR and ERP - Implementation Skills and Competency

 

If everyone were to implement ERP where would there be an IS competitive advantage? Companies have astonishingly varying degrees of success with implementation. The difference is in their abilities to address each of the critical success factors that we will discuss in the next chapter.

 

A company's ability to select a project it can support and manage, to appoint the right people to the various positions and to walk the line between energizing people and calming their fears is no small task. More than ever, the ability to manage change must become the job of everyone involved, not just that of a consultant or the project leader.

 

Thus, successfully and skillfully managing change is the distinctive competency that emerges from the integration of reengineering and information technology. This skill has been required in the past but has been ignored or given lip service. It is needed even more today and is still given less attention than required. Companies that recognize this factor will be more successful than those that do not. The issue is not the technology. Technology, as ever, is neutral. The issue is the ability to make creative use of that technology and to manage the massive change the system produces. Managing the changed process, with the same degree of discipline and rigor as the technology, will begin to happen more regularly when organizations see this as a core competency and start to manage it as a competitive advantage.