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Chapter 7
IMPLEMENTATION AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
How does a company ensure that its ERP investment pays off in increased profitability?
The key challenge is not in managing technology, but in managing people. An ERP system
changes how people work, and for the system to be effective, the change may have to be
dramatic, going beyond the way employees interact with the software to the way they
perform their tasks. Furthermore, business processes that are more effective require fewer
people. Some employees will no longer be needed. It is no small thing to ask people to
participate in a process that may not only change their day-to-day activities, but could
also eliminate their current jobs.
206 Managing the human behavior aspects of organizational change is called
organizational change management (OCM). Do not underestimate the importance of this
aspect of the implementation process. One of the keys to managing OCM is to realize that
most people do not mind change, they mind being changed. If the ERP implementation
is a project that is being forced on the employees, they will resist it. If employees view it
as a chance to make the company more efficient and effective by improving business
processes—and if these process improvements will make the company more profitable
and therefore provide more job security—there is a greater likelihood that employees will
support the implementation efforts. As mentioned earlier, the best way to improve a
business process is to have the people most familiar with the process leverage their
experience and creativity to develop process-improvement ideas. When employees have
contributed to a process change, they have a sense of ownership and will be more likely to
support the change.

Implementation Tools
Many tools are available to help manage implementation projects. Process mapping,
described previously, is perhaps the most critical. For an ERP implementation to go
smoothly and provide value, it is critical that a company understand both its current
processes and the desired state of the processes after implementation.
SAP provides Solution Manager, a set of tools and information that helps companies
manage the implementation of SAP ERP. In Solution Manager, the ERP implementation
project is presented in an Implementation Roadmap, consisting of the following five
phases:

• Project Preparation (15 to 20 days)
• Business Blueprint (25 to 40 days)
• Realization (55 to 80 days)
• Final Preparation (35 to 55 days)
• Go Live and Support (20 to 24 days)
Figure 7-17 shows an example of this roadmap. The left side of the Solution
Manager screen shows a hierarchical menu structure that organizes each step in the
implementation, and on the right side of the screen are the detailed items, the
descriptions, documents, white papers, tools, and so on to support each step.

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