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Large organisations, in
particular multi-national corporations, have been at the forefront of the
ERP movement since its origins. They have used these highly integrated
systems as a way to achieve greater levels of standardisation of business
processes across sites and greater centralisation of IT resources. The
most common scenario for an ERP implementation in a large multi-national
firm is the phased roll-out, whereby the modules of the application are
implemented in all the sites in a series of waves. A standard
implementation, as designed by Headquarters, is replicated in each site.
This standard implementation uses a base configuration, sometimes referred
to as a template or blueprint, which cannot be deviated from in any of the
sites. These monolithic implementations can be quite traumatic for
individual sites where local practices, sometimes quite well established
and rich in organizational learning, must be abandoned. This may lead to
large scale organisational problems, which must be ironed out if the full
potential of the enterprise-wide system is to be obtained.
In an attempt to tease out the issues in the global implementation of ERP
systems, we carried out a number of case studies at Irish manufacturing
sites of multinational firms where management sought ways to defend their
hard won local reputation for excellence and efficiency in the face of
changes to the organisation due to a corporate ERP implementation. Our
study indicates that local managers are given too little scope and time to
adequately adapt the template to their site and that the risk of
productivity loss is quite high, at least in the short term. We conclude
that mechanisms must be put in place to better understand how to
accommodate local specificities whilst enforcing the required level of
standardisation.
Keywords: ERP, Multi-national firms, IT strategy, Roll-out, IS
implementation.
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