Roles and Responsibilities in ERP Implementation

All business knows that implementing ERP takes a lot of resources and time, this also includes the quality of workforces that are required to implement all the system of the ERP. This makes implementing ERP to be very complicated and prone to failure. One of the most well-known ERP implementations failure case comes from Hershey. This company was trying to enhance its Information system capabilities, while cutting down its cost of operations, however, some issues in its ERP implementation caused its operational system to be paralyzed and failed to process and deliver $100 million dollar worth of its product to its customers. As a result, Hershey experienced a fall in its stock for a staggering 8%. 

Despite the high chance of failure, what really makes ERP irreplaceable in business process? ERP, an enterprise resource planning is a cross-functional information system that is usually used in large organizations mainly to enhance business management and operations within a centralized database. ERP works by providing a wide range coordination and integrations of all key business process, this allows all information to flow seamlessly across the business. Thus, giving the company advantages in efficiency of managing the business, which would cut a lot of cost and time. However, successfully implementing this system requires a great deal of skills and strategies, one of the most important factors that will decide these outcomes lies in the implementation of functional roles and responsibilities of the teams. 

Roles refers to the position of each person in the team, and responsibilities refers to the task and duties of each role for the team. In ERP implementation, every individual is held accountable for completing the task they have been given. They are the ones that will be deciding the outcomes of the ERP implementation, but first the supervisor needs to play their role to outline the works of the other employees. This means the clearer the supervisor direction will give better team performance to successfully fulfilling their roles in the teams. For supervisor and team leaders to effectively do their jobs, it is necessary to understand every individual role in the project.  

There are a lot of benefits that directly linked with a good understanding of roles and responsibilities in teams. Understand a functional roles and responsibilities creates a clear expectation on what every team member should do. This increases the team’s overall productivity in the long run and setting team success before long by successfully achieving optimal success. Clear guidelines will also be well received by the employees and increase morale of the teams. In turn, this could give a momentum for projects to be done a lot faster with more confidence, as they are defined those responsibilities of theirs, productivity will further increase. 

There are other benefits to Functional roles and responsibilities, which is the clear steps to develop it. In ERP implementation, supervising could be very challenging, as it works with a lot of diverse subjects, the supervisor tends to be overwhelmed with all the monitoring and cause failure in task delegation. This could be resolved by developing the functional roles and responsibilities step by step. The first step includes objectives and goals that need to be achieved, by doing this, responsibilities could be acknowledged by each employee, and this could speed up the progress on the project by a lot. The second step would be to identify the strength and weakness of the team. Once, their strength has been figured, assigning them to their area of expertise will help the team to work more efficiently, this is also very important for the employees as a way to further develop their skill set on the job. This also need some things to be considered, such as interpersonal skills, interest and achievement, these personality descriptions could help us to delegate their job better. Lastly, get feedback from the employees. Asking for opinions could gives insight and foster a clear stream of communication within the team. 

These functional roles and responsibilities are necessary to be fully understood by all roles in the project, whether as a team member or a team leader, its necessary to have a full understanding on how others work, especially some important team roles. These key ERP implementation team roles include Internal project management, super users, admin superuser, and senior management participation. These roles are directly connected to the outline of the entire project, as it guides the management resources, manages training and techniques that needs to be used for a successful implementation. These roles need to exist to ensure coordination between employees, reporting, and these roles also responsible for feedback in the department, and testing. All these roles interact a lot with the employees and even manage their workload, this needs them to understand the responsibilities of all the employees, so that there will be no inefficiency in utilizing the employees’ skills. 

In conclusion, implementing ERP will require a clearly defined roles and responsibilities of all parties that are involved in the project. Clearly understanding all the functional roles and responsibilities are important step in implementation of successful ERP software. Projecting the detailed plan for each employees’ responsibilities of ERP implementation, and allocating a clear time table for the project task is also important for the planning of the overall implementation. 

References: 

• A Case Study on Hershey’s ERP Implementation Failure (pemeco.com) 
• How To Define Your Team’s Roles and Responsibilities | Indeed.com 
• ERP Implementation Roles & Responsibilities Guide (leveragetech.com.au)