The design of these processes resulted in a split system, part of which was in CCC and part of which was outside CCC. Unfortunately, SAP was rolled-out before the transaction processing problems were dealt with. It then took a long time to unpick some of the problems that arose from the inefficient design of the transaction processing system. ‘We should have done more re-engineering before we actually did the implementation rather than afterwards. With hindsight, the inappropriateness of the transaction processes should have been addressed before SAP was rolled out.’ ‘But, a) we wanted to get the money out of the system, and b) you talk to other organizations… at the end of the day, we just had to force SAP into the organization and then sort the issues out afterwards. If we hadn’t stuck to our guns and said “we are going to do this”, the business would have thought of millions, hundreds of reasons why we shouldn’t go with SAP. ’‘Culturally, it was about centralization, about standardization and CCC at that time was an organization that wasn’t into centralized decision making or that kind of thing. And therefore we really just had to force the issue and hold our nerve. But it meant that we then had to do some things [afterwards] that, in retrospect, would have been best done [beforehand].’The level of success of the SAP implementation at CCC was felt to be due to the following: Strong championing of the implementation at the highest level in the organization. Standardization wherever possible. Use of vanilla SAP unless it was clearly better to make bespoke adjustments to the system. Achievement of buy-in to the system across the organization. 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, including the impending roll-out of a business data warehouse. (A utility that sits across the top of SAP which enables manipulation of large volumes of data both from within and outside of SAP).The role of the Management Accountants Although job satisfaction and staff turnover among Management Accountants has remained fairly constant, the number of Management Accountants has been reduced by approximately one-third since SAP was implemented. In effect, they are doing more with less.
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