The interviewee was a Senior Executive of a firm of Management Consultants that works with organizations that are going through large technology-driven change programmes. The Management Consultant described the experiences of one large listed company (referred to as BBB). All comments concerning post-implementation relate to one specific business unit of BBB, and all quotes are from the Management Consultant. Background The Management Consultants The companies with which the Management Consultants work are often undertaking significant ERP implementations, where the scope of organizational and process change required to deliver tangible benefit is significant. In the majority of cases, the ERP software involved has been SAP, but the Management Consultants have also been involved with other ERP software implementations, such as Oracle and People soft. The Management Consultants usually work with the business alongside a technical implementation partner to ensure that it is ready and able to adopt the new ways of working demanded by the new system. That is, the Management Consultants focus upon managing the organizational and process impacts of the implementation. As such, it is in an excellent position to assess the effect of ERP systems on the management accounting function within its client organizations. The Company (BBB)BBB is a heavy-engineering/chemicals company. It is a plc and is subdivided into a number of reporting units. In the late 1990s, BBB plc decided that it wanted to sell-off one of its main reporting units, which at the time consisted of six individual business units. Although part of a single reporting unit, these six business units all operated slightly differently from each other and had different accounting systems and processes based on legacy systems.
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