Although there have been some changes in personnel since the system went live in 1999, the number of Management Accountants has remained much as before. All the Management Accountants were on the project team, some full-time. The involvement of the others increased as it got closer to ‘go-live.’ While the Managing Director and the CFO were championing the project within the business, the project was mainly driven by one of the Management Accountants: ‘[He] was extremely strong. He was really driving this thing as well. Use of the system by the Management Accountants The ERP system supports the basic role that was previously performed by the Management Accountants. As a result, a very high proportion of the work undertaken by the Management Accountants was impacted upon by the ERP implementation. However, a lot of analyzing and a lot of decision support tasks are still performed out side the ERP system because the functionality that was implemented lacks flexibility in reporting. As a result, the Management Accountants still spend a lot of time taking information from the core transaction system, and putting it into spreadsheets, manipulating it and producing reports. Sometimes they ignore the facilities of the ERP system in order to do so. Over all, they now have far more information available and now produce both functional and cross-functional analyzing and reports. The changing role of the Management Accountants During and immediately after the implementation, the Management Accountants were major providers of ongoing support to the new system because they had been so actively involved in the actual implementation. This clearly had an impact on their workload at that time. The implementation ‘really affected the Management Accounting Department.’ They now have far more data available to them and can spend more time on analyzing and reporting of the external environment in the form of benchmarking, etc. The emphasis upon individual activities within the role of the Management Accountants has changed considerably. However, although they should now be much better placed to focus on providing a decision support service to the other business functions rather than acting as providers of traditional data collection and analyzing.
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