Lesson 4

As in the other past two days, we started by having a small recap of what had been seen the previous day. We went on talking about the qualities that had to be considered when selecting a Super User. They’ve got to have good communication, teaching and learning skills, they have to be master the process in which they’ll be assessing, they’ve got to be well respected within their working group and, they’ve got to be leaders among other qualities. Related to this matter we discussed which criteria on which one would select a core ERP team, and we all agreed that they should have experience in projects and that they should have a good successful career, not only this but the team should be composed of people representing the several departments of the company, and very important they have to be willing to learn.

We saw the pro’s and con´s of the Big Bang and Phased implementation. We did outsourcing vs. inhouse training pro´s and con’s, and centralized and decentralized pro’s and con’s as well. We came up with several pro’s and con’s for each, and this led me to the conclusion that there’s no right or wrong answer here, each company has to evaluate which is the right choice for them, which is the one that fits the best to their needs and structure.

Later on we formed teams based in our nationalities and pretended being the global ERP project executives (all from different places). We discussed the challenges of working together since we where all from different nationalities, and we shared our weaknesses and strengths, which I thought was very enriching since we got to see the our similarities and differences. We got to the conclusion that we had to focus in our similarities (as in we’re from different countries) when working together, and work in our differences so they wouldn’t become a big problem in the future.

At the end we got to discuss on the Harley Davidson Motor company case, which gave us an inside perspective of how the decisions are made in all its satages when implementing an ERP system.

I have to say that I enjoyed taking this class very much, it was very interesting and dynamic.

Good luck to you all in the exam tomorrow!