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140 Chapter 5 • Implementation Strategies

CASE 5-1
Opening Case
Aquatech International Corporation

COMPANY OVERVIEW
Aquatech International Corporation was established in 1981 and specialized in pure water
systems for the power industry. The company diversified its products in the late 1980s and
developed a worldwide presence in the 1990s.
The headquarters of Aquatech is in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and the company has
offices across the United States and all around the globe, including Canada, China, and
India. Aquatech provides water treatment solutions, including design, engineering, project
management, manufacturing, turnkey installations, and commissioning and field trou-
bleshooting for several types of water treatments. With these technologies and services,
Aquatech has clients in the power generation, semiconductor, petrochemical, automotive,
chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, fertilizer, microelectronics, and steel industries.
The existing Aquatech information systems had begun to hinder the company’s
growth. Most of the company’s data were on paper. As the company grew and expanded, it
became a time-consuming and often a very complex process to develop strategic reports on
business and personnel processes. To remedy this, the company decided to replace their
legacy systems with an ERP system that would automate and integrate business processes
and data to produce key management reports.

ERP IMPLEMENTATION
Aquatech chose SAP as its ERP to implement. An external consultant evaluated the different
ERP systems on the market. Aquatech initially believed that SAP was not a good fit, but as
the company went through the evaluation process, with help from an external consultant,
they decided SAP actually was the best system for them.
The implementation took one year, and, similar to other implementations, issues
were discovered as they went through the implementation process.
“We thought we’d have a really easy time because we had no legacy system,” said
Devesh Sharma, Aquatech’s vice president of products and services. “We were wrong.”
The implementation suffered from not enough skilled and dedicated resources, a lack
of project sponsorship and accountability, institutional resistance, less-than-adequate com-
munications, and a lack of clear goals. Even with these issues, the system went live and the
implementation one year later was a success.
At this time, Aquatech has a regular set of reports and data on virtually every aspect
of the company’s operations, including manufacturing and finances. The company now
makes decisions based on current information.

CONCLUSION
Even though Aquatech did a very good job in evaluating the fit of SAP, they did not assess
their readiness to start the implementation. If they had evaluated their readiness, they would
have understood that more buy-in from the users and senior management was needed and
that they lacked overall implementation experience.