Our approach had to be insistent, tenacious and enduring to ensure effective participation of the broader business community with the project team. I admit at times it felt like we were having to drag some people to the table “kicking and screaming. ‘At the same time, we had to be supportive and make sure that we did what ever we could to ease the burden on them. We always tried to ask for their help rather than demand their input and sometimes played to their egos by claiming that things simply could not progress forward without their support. And it was difficult, because at the time from an accounting viewpoint, they had far too much work on and they were effectively trying to fit the demands of the system implementation into their spare time. Over time, things became much easier as the rapport and understanding between us increased and also as they started to see the necessity and benefit of their contribution.’ ‘But it had to be… relentless. You couldn’t… “let them off the hook”. you couldn’t get them involved one week and then let them not participate for two months, you had to find ways to maintain their involvement throughout. Although it is important to recognizes that their time involvement did vary depending on the stage of implementation with an obvious overall increase as the programmer progressed towards go-live.’ Did you work with all of them or just with some of them? ‘Just with some of them. We worked closely with at least one representative of each business unit, who in turn then worked with their broader business community.’ Did you do this with any other functional group within the company? ‘Yes. Although finance had a very high profile we also had to ensure that the other business functions, e.g. Sales and distribution, procurement, manufacturing, etc. were also adequately represented and involved. We also used cross functional workshop type events to bring people from different parts of the organization together to understand the “end to end” integrated business processes that the ERP system introduced.’ Did the Management Accountants get any training in the use of SAP while you were doing this? ‘Yes, they did. I think most of them found the SAP training that they received in the early stages not particularly useful because it was generally too generic and the oretical. It was only when they could experience the functionality in the context of their actual business unit and business processes that it really meant anything.’ ‘Because of the high profile of the finance community during the implementation and because of the relatively small number of people, the majority of the accounting staff had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of the new system during the different phases of the implementation.
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