In Corporate America, any large ERP project will affect hundreds of business processes, thousands of employees and make or cost millions of dollars.  Several technically brilliant projects can be business failures while some klugy projects can deliver customer satisfaction and business value.  It is clear by now that success is determined not by financial wizardry or technical brilliance but something in between.  As paradigms change, jobs get exported and imported and financial legerdemain replaces net present values, it becomes important to determine how employers and employees can best harness the changes and cooperate and compete in their own enlightened self-interest.

Success and failure of a project can often depend on perspective.  To the extent that these perspectives merge, the corporation stands to maximize its profit potential from the project as a whole.

From a senior management point of view, it is important to:
1.  Understand and quantify the business reason for the initial pain implied by an ERP project
2.  Communicate the strategy
3.  Obtain buy-in from employees
4.  Encourage their staff to plan for and implement a path to arrive at the new processes

Since employees are deeply affected by the projects, it is also up to each employee to determine:
1.  The fundamental reason for the change, based on corporate statements and their own research
2.  How they will personally be affected by the changes
3.  How best they can respond to these changes

In this way, all the parties will then need to ensure that they can get the optimal return for their jobs and careers while also maintaining a quasi-fiduciary responsibility towards the well-being of the corporation as a whole.  Lifetime jobs and corporate loyalty are long past but a new employer-employee relationship is yet to get crystallized.  In succeeding blogs, I will analyze on how best management and employees can work together to obtain the best possible outcome for themselves in this new merry-go-round that we call Corporate America.

I think that the Business needs to do way more than just get “buy-in” from their employees. The business needs to woo them and make them fall in love with the ERP before the implementation even starts.  But this rarely happens.  More often than not, the employees feel a “Get on the bus or get left in the dust” sentiment. Where’s the wooing?  The Business forgets the power of the people whose long hours, work-life imbalance, and missed vacations made their company the kind that can drop a cool hundred million on an ERP.  Even passive resistance from the Employees can make that Ferrari of an ERP they overpaid for run like a 3-cylinder Yugo.  Employees drive the Business and when the Business disrespects that fact, implementing an ERP hurts more than it helps.

By Hannah on October 25, 2007

You are absolutely right--future blogs will discuss each of the points introduced and how business and employees and work together to optimize the benefit!

By raja on October 25, 2007