ASSESSMENT OF TRANSITION STRATEGIES ON IMPLEMENATION OF ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING PROJECT AT INDUSTRIAL PARKS DEVELOPMEMNT CORPORATION

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to assess the transition strategy of ERP project at Industrial Parks Development Corporation. Implementing an ERP system in any business company brings significant change to the working environment. As such, the transition from the old environment to the new one with deployment of ERP system needs careful consideration. There are several types of ERP transition strategies that can be applied, which includes Big-Bang, Phase by Phase, Roll Out, Pilot Program and Prototype. Also, any of the transition strategies can be combined with another one to yield the desired ERP implementation outcome for the company. The research followed descriptive research method with census sampling to include all fifty-five staff who participated in the ERP project. Both Qualitative and Quantitative data analysis were used to analyze primary and secondary data. Questionnaire were distributed to all participants and 80% of the respondents provided their feedback along with four in-depth interviews on some of the questions. At IPDC, the ERP project followed mainly Phase-by-Phase type of transition strategy by mixing with Roll Out in order for the corporation to make the ERP system available at Head Office as well as each industrial parks throughout Ethiopia. Based on the feedback obtained from questionnaire respondents, such type of transition strategy was suitable for the corporation by considering the budget, scope time and quality of the ERP system. During in depth interview, the researcher also found out that the corporation chose to use phased approach of transition strategy due to budget limitation from the project sponsors. During the ERP project, the corporation formed a dedicated ERP Project Management office (PMO) that oversaw the implementation using phased approach to deploy the identified modules in the Finance, Human Resource and Procurement departments. In conclusion, the researcher found out that the corporation was able to successfully deploy the ERP system at Head Office and branch industrial parks by mixing phase and roll out transition strategies. The researcher recommended that similar type of ERP projects for large corporation with several branch locations could be deployed with “Pilot Program” type of transition strategy in order to utilize project resources as well as avoid potential risks of failure. Furthermore, ERP projects with multiple modules can also be deployed with phase-by-phase sub-modules by focusing on the main ones and later on integrating with additional modules as deemed necessary.