ERP Know More - Cultural Change After IT/Automation Adoption

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In the beginning, we said IT enables complex computations and information sharing. Complex computations can be successful only when information needed for computation is (a) accurate and (b) timely. Information sharing can be successful only when the supplying the information to a consumer knows and understand the criticality and is incented to do so accurately.

So yes, the culture is an important dimension. It is good educate employees on the criticality of information sharing tasks, provide feedback on execution and incent them to do better. A large MRP cannot be successful if inventory information is not updated. A best practice such as “available to promise” – fundamental to sales people (as it indicates what is available for sale and when it is available), would fail if for some reason the finished goods inventory is not updated. The linkages between processes and systems, mechanisms to identify exceptions and handle them and means to escalation and dispute resolution must be clear as day.

Complete cultural control is achievable if the employees handling IT tasks are educated on the nature of the task, the autonomy (handling routine vs. non-routine tasks), the significance of task (impact it will have on the organization), estimated breadth of skills required to accomplish the task, and lastly feedback on the quality of task execution.

Contributed by : K. Shyaam Sunder, Chief Knowledge Officer, Ramco Systems