Q.3 Can an informed ERP adoption and selection decision be made without fully understanding the problem? Why or why not – justify your answer.
Following on from the previous week provide a rough skeleton of what you are going to put in your conclusions and recommendations.
A person or a company cannot make an informed decision on selecting and implementing without knowing as much as they possibly can about a problem. While you can never fully understand a problem, you can understand enough to find away to correct it or prevent it from happening again.
If a company was to select and implement an ERP without properly understanding the problem, the company could be wasting a lot of time and money without actually addressing the problem, possibly open the company to even more problems down the track and since the company didn’t fully understand what they were doing in the first place they might find it even harder to determine what have done wrong. While this would indicate that the business is operating in a dangerous way, as this type of decision making in the business world is more than not advisable, it could lead to the collapse of the company as shown by companies who have failed to implement a ERP properly. Entering into anything without properly understanding what you’re getting yourself into will only lead to more problems.
As there is no one ERP that suits all businesses and correct all problems, this means that simply they would be taking a shot in the dark and hoping for the best outcome and this can only lead to trouble for everyone concerned, as this shows a reckless attitude to making business decisions.
Conclusion
Throughout my research of ERPs I have found that a common factor about ERPs is that they are very fragile in the implementation phase, and if not done right in this stage there could be many problems down the track, including ERP failure. As RMIT has been plague with problems since the beginning it would seem that ERP could be damage through the actions of the implementation team and therefore could be more costly than it’s worth to try and fix it. Especially when it will most likely be fixed by those who were behind the original implementation phase, as the cost of the ERP is already way passed budget, it would recommended that RMIT should abandon this course of action and try and minimize any more loses and try to find a more simple way of getting the job done without the cost of an ERP. Failing that RMIT should try and salvage some of their work and see if they can get certain modules of the ERP to work, so that the project wasn’t a complete waste of time and money.
