The implementation team comprised of consultants from the joint venture and CCC staff. At its height, there were between 70 and 80 CCC employees working on the implementation team. There were approximately 6000 users on the initial implementation, though this has been reduced to around 4000 as it became clearer who would actually use the system. Implementation of SAP took approximately 3 years. Rollout was in three phases. Firstly, a pilot implementation was done in one of the geographical divisions of CCC (which was, in effect, a mini-version of CCC). Then, in November 1999, SAP was rolled-out into half of the other divisions. The third phase occurred at the start of April 2000, when SAP was rolled-out into the rest of CCC. (This latter date was carefully selected in order to have the new system implemented across the organization at the start of its 2000/2001 financial year, thus avoiding any problems arising from converting from one accounting system to another mid-financial year.)Savings arose from the outsourcing of transaction processing and other efficiency savings within CCC (e.g. the number of Management Accountants was reduced by outsourcing) but by far the greatest contributor to annual cost savings of about £17.5million a year since implementation is the SAP system, and ‘that is after allowing for the cost of SAP.’ In achieving cost savings of this magnitude, the initial targeted savings were met; and, because the initial targeted savings were of this level, the implementation project consistently received strong backing from the very top of the organization. It was about 18 months after rollout that people began to see the benefits of the system. By that time, a full year’s business cycle had been completed. The budget had been done, a financial year-end had been completed and a lot of initial teething problems had been addressed. The Management Accountants were among the first to feel the benefits of the implementation. ‘I think SAP is like a lot of other systems. Part of the problem is that when you implement these systems, the pain is felt in one place and the gains felt somewhere else. So the Management Accountants felt the gain quite early on in the life cycle whereas the poor [people] sitting at the sharp end having to raise purchase orders, and all that kind of stuff, they [were] feeling the pain and they [didn’t] really seethe benefits… of the system because they [were] much further up the value chain. But I think that is the same with all big systems implementations. The project had two key champions. The one whose commitment was essential in the early stages was the CEO, who took up his role just as the final decision was about to be made. Traditionally, within CCC, finance has been seen as a support function rather than one that leads change. If the Chief Executive had not championed the project, it would have been very difficult for the finance function to have convinced the key players in the organization that going through such enormous change would be beneficial to them.
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