Managing Processes, System and Project

5. Part 3: Implementation and impact

5.1 Project Improvement Plan

This section now details the next component of the MPSP module-Evaluate. In order to study the implementation and impact, it is first essential to evaluate the ERP solution that has been recommended for the automation of workforce diversity. There are basically four criteria which would evaluate the course of action. Once an evaluation has been done, then one can ascertain the actions that are needed to ensure that the company would be able to achieve business benefits out of implementing this ERP system. The four criteria have been mentioned as follows:

• Comprehensive
• Coherence
• Correspondence
• Criticality

The first of these factors is to be comprehensive. This requires that all the key decisions areas should be covered in the strategy opted by the company. Here, the strategy opted is to have an automated workforce diversity management system. This is possible by using ERP services from one of SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics as they are the leaders in the field and will suit the purpose of Dhiraagu, being such a huge organization. We can see that all the major decision areas in HR management including workforce diversity management can be handled if this ERP system is taken. Even the functionalities of financial control can be achieved using this method (Wagner, & Monk, 2008). This suggests the fact that the ERP system is highly comprehensive in nature for the purpose required.

Though the functionalities of the system are different, yet it is coherent in nature. We have seen that processes starting from hiring to travel management can be managed using this ERP system. Now, all these functions work towards one major cause, alignment with the organizational goal. This was also one of the pre-requisites of having the system installed. In other words, in this ERP system, none of the functionalities counter each other, and in the end, the organization benefits out of it.

5.2 Reason and Influence of Recommendation

Correspondence: This suggests that there should be a correspondence between the structural and the infrastructural decisions made by the company. The structural decisions are total responsibility of the company management whereas the infrastructural decisions are dependent on the ERP system. The company needs to maintain consistent check on the fact that functions like workforce management, quality management, organization design and structure are always corresponding to the structural input laid by the company. This also means that the company should ensure that it is always in favor of profit maximization after adopting these strategies. This is one area where changes of impact would be seen and would have to be positive for the management to make a final approval.

As an important course of action that the company needs to take in order to implement the operational strategy that has been discussed, it is important to meet the criticality issues. This is when some of the important organization functions become much more important than the others. In this case, it is in the form of employer and employee satisfaction. One would have to ensure that other than the short-term profitability of the organization, for this profitability to be maintained in the long-run, there has to be a high degree of employer and employee satisfaction (Curtis, & Dreachslin, 2008). So, a consistent research of the same would have to be done continuously by the company. There are many courses of action that can be taken so that this can come into effect. One of them is to take interviews of the influential personnel in the organization. Other than that, an effective questionnaire can be distributed among the majority of the workforce so that all diversities are covered. The reason for doing the same is that one can attain feedback from the implementation of this new ERP system. Also, the company can have a look at the attrition levels to see the impact of the new ERP system. There are many other actions that can also be taken in order to see that the ERP system is implemented to the best of necessity of the company.

All the processes like hiring, organizational structural change, regulations in functionalities, roles of affected managers, business processes etc. would have to be compared to the current scenario in the company. Only a positive result from this comparison will ensure that the intended business benefits are realized (Moriones, & Cerio, 2002).

Of all the various factors that are associated with finding out the fact whether this new ERP system is beneficial to the company, it would be most essential to convince the top management of the company. Under the government pressure, top managerial authority is spending huge money on training of local population. The following MOS matrix can hence be shown to the top management so that the idea of ERP system looks more feasible to the management.

As we have seen, this table has been constructed from the correlation results of the responses of the company employees. Though 80% of the employee population is composed of expatriates, the status of this form of training to fight out the operational issues is not very attractive. In most of the critical cases, it is a partial requirement. Also in case of diversity that is the major issue, as current training technique, methods and planning has totally failed. The top management should also have access to this MOS matrix so that it can realize the importance of having an ERP system. The major resistance would also be because of the fact that an ERP system is highly expensive and the past records show that more than 60% of the case, it has not been successful. A further survey of the fact shows that this is because the companies have not been able to give the entire information as required for the customization of the ERP package. It is one of the major courses of action that has full support of the management. Full support can also be gained by showing the stupendous success results of those companies where the top management has been co-operative enough, so that those companies could improve in their HR management, hence helping the company to do better.

Before the company would actually start with the implementation of this strategy of automated workforce diversification management, it would have to provide substantial training to the employees and the managers, so that they could get used to it before implementation. Also, we can support this by the fact that in most cases, training is partially suitable while it is highly suitable for diversification (Naylor, 2002). So, it has its own importance in the implementation of the ERP system to achieve the required results.

Also, the company would have to decide on how many user accounts it would need for the ERP system to be implemented. The reason for the same is that the cost of this ERP system is dependent on the number of user accounts that the company requires. One can save on this by having one user account and associating a team of users for the same. There would be a restricted form of usage depending on the requirement of the company. The company should hence hire an effective ERP consultancy team so that it could make an optimized number of user-groups to best suit the purpose. Hence, this again hints at establishing a trade-off between investment and utility.

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