Top management support
The role of the top management of a company is to develop company-wide understanding of the goals and objective of the project. Moreover, it should acknowledge that like any system, ERP has its own limitations and thus manage relevant expectations properly. Executives should circulate the importance of the project regularly and personally participate in the project ongoing activities compared to delegating it to subordinates and worse to technical staff (Holland and Light, 1999). They must be ready to allocate required resource and be willing to clarify any political conflicts. Since the ERP implementation imposes a serious change of practices they must help company members to overcome resistance by various means, explicitly
Frequently, this simple task is overseen by management though it proved a good guidance for the whole team and a company leading to significant deviations. Without knowing the final destination the project can be side tracked. The implementation of ERP system should not by viewed as a goal but rather as a tool to achieve some strategic goals. Thus there should be an explicit link between business goals and IS strategy and those goals should be measurable (Al-Mashari et al., 2003). For example, number of modules to deploy and how each will facilitate the improvement of order fulfilment. This will help employees better understand a vision and reasons of ERP implementation in the company, steering a project to completion. It will also help to focus on business benefits of (Nah et al.,
(2008) being neutral observers in the SAP system implementation project in multinational pharmaceutical company’s - Pharma Inc. - found out that formal project management framework played very important role in the whole process. Their study proved that the project management had contributed most to ERP system success. Evidently, the structure of project management body of knowledge (PMBOK) framework prevented reworks and project delays.
Equally important in Pharma Inc. was the selection of team members and existence of a high profile team leader. The team facilitated the whole company in migration to a new system and after go-live conducted various assessments in regards to the company’s utilization of the system.
This point applies to the next critical factor