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ERP: Integrating and Extending the Enterprise

As part of LMI’s mission of advancing the science of government management, we assemble senior government leaders and their peer experts in academia and industry, holding several special roundtable sessions each year called "Executive Forums." These small, private gatherings are designed to engage high-level executives in topics encompassing emerging or perennial issues facing government. By invitation only, these senior executive events provide a rare opportunity for leading minds to share best practices, case histories, and new thinking.

During our Executive Forum on ERP implementation, senior managers from the Department of Defense, federal agencies, state government, and private industry discussed the benefits and challenges encountered in ERP implementation. The guest speakers, a senior leader from the public sector and an executive from industry, revealed that while the public and private sectors operate different business models, the lessons learned from their ongoing ERP implementations are very similar.

Even though ERP implementation is a large investment in technology infrastructure, it also requires the cultural transformation of the entire organization. Critical to its success is the driving force of senior leadership and the passion with which it leads the organization through this change. The benefits these leaders have observed directly influence the bottom line:

• Growth in sales
• Increased productivity
• Improved forecasting, leading to reduced inventory cost
• Reduced cost of distribution network
• Reduced cost of information technology through divestiture of inefficient legacy applications.

The senior leaders in attendance discussed other critical success factors. Organizational change management, training and more training, incremental transition to the new information technology systems, strong project management, and “ruthless scope control” were some of the ideas that supported successful implementations. Benchmarking, concept demonstrations, and ongoing training mitigate risks over the life cycle of these complex programs. As the session concluded, it was clear that although ERP implementations began in the late 1980s, we are still learning lessons and discovering best practices.

An article summarizing insights gained from the discussion was published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Public Manager, a leading quarterly journal dedicated to practical solutions for government managers. Please take the opportunity to review this and other articles published summarizing Executive Forum discussions.