He had to be convinced that it was the right thing to do. But once he had been convinced that is was, he was very vocal in support of [it,] which was absolutely critical in terms of rolling it out… We needed [the CEO] as a leader of the [key players] to be the person saying, “Yes, we should be doing this kind of thing.” The visionary and other key champion behind the project was the current Chief Operating Officer (COO) of CCC. Once the Chief Executive had given his backing to the project and established commitment throughout the organization, even had he then left the company, the COO would have been able to drive the project to completion. The Senior Executive (finance) viewed SAP as business function-orientated and CCC as business process orientated when the project started. Although there has been some movement towards bringing the orientation of CCC closer to that of SAP, the match between SAP and the organizational structure of CCC is now only about 4 on a scale of 1–7, where 1 is no match and 7 a perfect match. ‘It is getting closer but it matches more now [September 2004] than it did at the time [1997], but I would not describe them as completely aligned.’ The project is considered to have been a success. Quite apart from the financial benefits, success can also be seen in: Halving of the time taken to do monthly reporting to the Board level, from 18to 19 days down to 9 days – a significant saving in terms of the time it takes to close the accounts. Vastly improved reporting as a result of greatly improved visibility of and access to information – ‘even the most senior managers who have very little contact with SAP will say that “The thing that SAP has given me is huge visibility of costs so that you can run reports on costs, you can control projects better.” ’The ability to build on the base that SAP has provided, bringing in information from other sources in a way that could not have been achieved before. Budgetary control has improved because there is now more time available for analyzing and more exception reporting being done. More is being done with less people. The basic level of financial controls has improved to the point that for the last2 years, the external auditors have had no major issues with anything in the organization. Although outsourcing transaction processing saved significant amounts of money, the transaction processes that were outsourced to the joint venture were poor –‘they were not very slick and there were lots of problems with them.
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