In addition to the obvious concern about the risk to ongoing operations that this posed, BBB was concerned that the outdated systems would reduce the potential revenue from the sale of the businesses. Consequently , it was decided to bring all six business units within the reporting unit onto a unified accounting system based on ERP technology. SAP was selected as the software and the decision was taken in 1997 to proceed with the implementation. As the major focus of the programmer was unification of the disparate accounting systems and processes of the business units and avoidance of millennium bug-related problems, the system implementation could be described as a ‘replacement’ as opposed to one that was driven by a ‘heavy-benefits’ case. This distinction had a major influence on the ultimate assessment of the success of the implementation. ‘They had to do something…ongoing operations were at risk and they would have struggled to sell the businesses if they hadn’t put new systems in, because of the millennium threat, etc. …’The organization had a very ingrained culture – many of the employees had been working in the same relatively unchanging environment for at least 15 years. They were used to doing their tasks one way, and one way only. In terms of the organization itself, the Finance Department and the Management Accountants within it included some very high caliber individuals who were also (because of the organizational capability of recruiting some of the very best people) very intelligent but (because they had been with the company for so long) they were highly resistant to change in their role or in the manner in which they performed their tasks. They were very accustomed to doing things in a particular way and had very fixed views of how things should be done. Before the implementation, the reporting unit within BBB was very business function-oriented. Because each business unit was fundamentally a stand-alone company, there was a ‘silo’ mentality between them and little need for cross-business analyzing . Each operating unit was judged on its own merits and, as long as it was meeting its targets, the management of the overall reporting unit saw no need for cross-unit business analyzing other than for consolidated reporting. On a 7-point scale (where do not match and match completely) the match between the existing organization and the process-oriented ERP software was assessed as ‘3.’ Unsurprisingly, this mismatch between organization culture and the ERP software led to difficulties in the implementation process. The company faced a number of challenges/decisions from the start. The business units were going to shift from virtually uninterested individual data recording and reporting systems to having one information system, one integrated data recording and reporting system, one way of working and one set of commercial and financial processes common to all of them. There was a lot of resistance across the different business units to the idea that they could all use the same information system and recording and reporting processes.
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