This organization (referred to as CCC) is a very large UK-based international audio and telecommunications production and distribution company. A Senior Executive(finance) described the case of the ERP system implementation across the organization. All quotes are from the Senior Executive. In 2000, CCC completed implementation of various modules of SAP, including all the finance modules: Sales Ledger, Purchase Ledger, General Ledger, Fixed Assets, the whole suite from that perspective. Only some of the non-finance modules were implemented. The implementation of SAP at CCC was part of a two-part change strategy aimed at reducing costs to the organization. Firstly, all CCC’s financial transaction processing was outsourced, and then SAP was implemented across CCC. In 1996, CCC benchmarked itself with external organizations. This led to a conclusion that CCC’s finance costs were at least 2–3 times more expensive than they should have been for an organization of its size and complexity. There was obvious duplication across the organization – for example, 36 different general ledger systems were in use across CCC and all the different divisions of CCC had their own small finance teams, including transaction processing. To address the issues highlighted by the benchmarking exercise, transaction processing was centralized within CCC for 1 year. Then, in 1997, CCC entered into a contract with a joint venture between a ‘big-4’ accounting firm and a top-100Fortune 500 consultancy company specializing in business and technology solutions to improve business performance. The contract was in two parts. Firstly, transaction processing was outsourced to the joint venture and all those employed on transaction processing within CCC we retransferred into the new organization. Secondly, in order to streamline the business information system and eliminate duplication, CCC decided (with the assistance of the joint venture) to switch to an SAP-based system that would not only be implemented across the entire organization but also used in the same way, irrespective of where in the organization it was being used. That is, from the outset, bespoke items, such as specially written reports were replaced by generic, organization-wide practices.
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