3.16.2006

ERP Readiness Benchmarks: Do Companies Know What They're Getting Themselves Into?

One of our recent posts highlighted the importance of assessing readiness before any ERP or large IT project. Panorama Consulting Group provides a free on-line ERP readiness assessment tool, and the preliminary results from participants so far reveal some interesting thoughts.

It should be noted that the sample size is still relatively small (38 companies so far) and the initial data analysis is not yet validated in detail, but the initial benchmarks are interesting. For example:

  1. 42% of participants say that their operations are poorly integrated across office locations
  2. Over 50% of participants rate their current organizations poor in all the major areas we asked about: responsiveness to customers, efficiency, effectiveness, visibility to operational data, and integration between systems
  3. Over 90% of companies have experienced a significant organizational change (in addition to ERP) over the last 3 years
  4. Only 20% of participants have dedicated business process, performance measurement, or organizational change management groups in their organizations
  5. 55% say employees at their organizations are poor at adapting to change
  6. Only 15% of those planning to embark on an ERP project have completed a business case or ROI analysis

While we can begin to draw several conclusions from some of the data we've collected so far, the most significant observation is that organizational change management will be crucial to the success of these projects. These companies will face great obstacles during their implementations, and they will find it very difficult to deliver measurable business value without solid organizational change and benefit realization plans.

More data analysis over time will continue to shed light on organizational readiness. I'll keep you posted on the results. In the meantime, feel free to visit our resource center for more ERP tools and information.

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