Lecture 3 - Sangyoun Han

Today’s class was very interesting and involved lots of discussion. The topics mentioned during the discussion revolved around the three articles which we were assigned over the past 2 days. Key lessons learned were;

- There are several models which can be used to determine whether an ERP system is needed in an organization

o The most popular method is the political model; however, it is important to note that this is only a one-sided argument. Therefore, other models may better suit different businesses

- when implementing an ERP system, culture plays a very important role

o different ways certain cultures adapt to change

o how cultures accept changes from a function oriented system to a process oriented system

o we discussed cultures within the class such as German, Mexican, Chinese, Korean, Canadian, American, Turkish and French

- the two cultures present within the Chinese culture was mentioned

o SOE and PV; how both groups had different ways to adapt to the ERP system

o PV organization were able to adapt faster because these firms were willing to change

After these discussions, we went to new issues related to the articles such as how firms can address issues with an ERP implementation program. It was discovered that organizations which had good communication with its employees were more likely to succeed with the new ERP system. Employees needed to be aware of this change, and had to understand why the change was occurring. Furthermore, organizations had the responsibility to train employees on how to use ERP systems as well as implement “Super-Users” to help the change in software. Management also had the duty to try and motivate its workforce to learn this new program.

The main point of the discussion was that in order to make the ERP system successful with the employees, everyone needed to feel involved and part of the team in order to be motivated. Therefore, achieving this required superior communication among the workforce.