ERP INTEGRATION PROJECT
Assessing Impacts on Organisational Agents throught a Change Management
Approach
Clement Perotti
1,2
, Stéphanie Minel
1
, Benoît Roussel
2
1
LIPSI - ESTIA-Recherche, Technopôle Izarbel, 64 210 Bidart, France
2
INPL – ERPI, 8 rue Bastien Lepage, BP647 54 010 Nancy, France
Jean Renaud
LGECO – INSA, 24 Boulevard de la Victoire, 67 084 Strasbourg, France
Keywords: ERP Integration, Organizational Change, Change Management, Standard Deployment, Project
Management.
Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of a large ERP deployment project on the organizational agents who use
it within the framework of their activities. In this article, we first present some material showing that, in our
case study, this project aims to standardize the company’s Information System (IS), and represents a change
on both individual and organizational levels. Second, we go into detail of project management and more
specifically, of change management within the framework of projects. Third, we advance some argument
showing that “structured” change management approaches could be an efficient way to make project team
deal with individual change in order to succeed in ERP deployment.
1 INTRODUCTION
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is
covering a variety of activities with the help of
software that assist businesses in managing different
functions like product planning, purchasing,
inventories, supplier, customer service and order
tracking (Klaus et Al., 2000; Lee et Al., 2003). In
order to do so, some business’ employees have to
use this software on a daily basis to insert in the
system some data related to their activities.
Employees can be considered as the main input
source of ERP, as they compute and “translate” real
life data in the system. Consequently, to ensure
benefits of ERP utilization, the company must help
employees to actually pass from their former way to
do thing to this new way. For Afitep-Afnor, a project
is “a specific approach that methodically and
gradually structures a future reality and (…) that
implies a goal, and needs to tackle on with
determinate resources” (Afitep-Afnor, 1992). This
study, based on an ERP deployment project, focuses
on defining how to accompany employees during
this phase. In our opinion, ERP deployment
represents a typical case of organizational and
individual change.
Consequently, this PhD in progress research
paper is written to address the notion of individual
change during ERP implementation. Due to the
diverse nature of ERP systems, the author is only
concentrating on factors related to end users during
deployment phases. This position paper involves a
6000 employees international aeronautical French
company.
2 ERP DEPLOYMENT
2.1 An Information System
Standardisation
The case study for this paper involves a
multinational ERP deployment project in every
industrial and commercial establishment of an
aeronautical company. 4 out of 14 sites have already
the ERP implemented for several years, and a global
deployment project is in progress in order to set this
411
Perotti C., Minel S., Roussel B. and Renaud J. (2010).
ERP INTEGRATION PROJECT - Assessing Impacts on Organisational Agents throught a Change Management Approach.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages
411-414
DOI: 10.5220/0003018204110414
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

Information System (IS) in other sites. Our
contribution aims to provide improvements axes and
feedback for further ERP deployment, based on the
experience of previous implementations.
At this point, the ERP is set in the 3 French sites
of the company (which also are the main sites), and
in a recently created American site. Due to a specific
context in this latter (This ERP is the only IS this
site ever had), the material presented in this paper
will solely be based on the analysis of deployment in
French sites; indeed, this situation is similar with
what will happen in other sites, in that a previously
used IS could be found.
An interview with the international IS
responsible reflects that implementing an ERP is a
way to standardize company’s IS. According to him,
“this (SI) standardisation makes easier
communication, synergy, and practises sharing
between sites. It also allows limits configuration
management-related problems”. Moreover, an
interesting point has emerged from this discussion;
when saying “we don’t control yet data security [...]
Standardizing allows us to guarantee data
safeguarding.”, he underlines that standardisation
changes something. For MacKay et. Al, «each
standard represent a desirable state to reach»
(MacKay et Al., 2004), and change process is started
by the definition of a state to reach (Norrgren et Al.,
96); this vision implies that the process which
implements the standard in the organization can be
regarded as an organizational change.
The next section presents some material detailing
the impacts of ERP setting on company’s
employees.
2.2 Impacts Assessment
According to Jaujard “individuals systematically
emerge as the main actors of change, whatever this
change is” (Jaujard, 2007). In order to measure how
these actors perceived the impacts related to IS
change, an intern survey has been carried out. An
anonymous questionnaire has been sent to 490
randomly chosen ERP users (out of 4000 actual
users). They were asked to evaluate on a four level
scale what ERP setting changed according to four
categories of impact: organization, jobs, tools and
culture. For each impact category, ERP users were
asked to rate the impact level between 1 and 4 (1
stands for no impact, 2 stands for average impact, 3
stands for high impact and 4 stands for very high
impact). A final question asked them if, yes or no,
they perceived a moment when using the ERP
became more comfortable.
A 10 % global answer rate has been recorded.
The following table presents the results.
Table 1: ERP implementation’s impacts assessment
survey.
Based on a 49 answers
sample
Mean Standard
deviation
Variance
Organization: within the
framework of your
activity, has [the ERP]
changed the work
organization?
2,55 1,06 1,12
Job: within the framework
of your activity, has [the
ERP] changed your job?
(activities addition,
change, or removal)
2,39 0,97 0,95
Tools: Has [the ERP]
changed your working
tools? (informatics or
other tools)
2,71 0,98 0,97
Culture: within the
framework of your
activity, has [the ERP]
changed your behaviours,
or your frame of mind?
2,37 0,94 0,89
Has there been a moment
when you felt more at
ease with [the ERP]
utilization ?
81,5%answered“Yes”
The two strongest measured impacts are relative
to organization and tools. Although no structured
change management approach had been used during
this ERP deployment, training about new
informatics tool and communication on how the new
organization was structured had been realized.
Gomez et Al. confirm that “ERP integration can be
regarded as a change in IS and in process
management” (Gomez et Al., 2002). Employees
perceive that this organizational change made them
change something. In addition, more than 8 out of 10
perceived a moment when using the ERP became
more comfortable. With every proposed change’s
impact category being rated between an “average”
and “high” level, and a majority of user perceiving a
change in their ease with using the ERP, our results
tends to confirm that ERP deployment is perceived
as a change by end users.
In this chapter, we established ERP deployment
being an organizational change impacting
individual, and making them change habits and
behaviours. As this ERP is currently being
implemented through project in case study of
company, next section will present literature’s
contribution on organizational and individual change
management within the framework of projects.
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3 MANAGING CHANGES
3.1 Project Actors and Change Levels
As told by Partington (Partington, 1996), “project is
increasingly used to manage organizational
change”, mainly because project is future oriented,
generates more collaboration, more learning, and
allows dealing with manageable levels of time and
complexity. The core of project is project team: this
group of employees (generally operational
managers) is composed specifically for each project,
taking into account the needed competences and the
required taskforce to reach the goal on time, with
determinate resources. In our case study, project
team is run by a manager called project leader, and
the project itself is initiated by a top manager or a
director, identified as the project sponsor.
Actual project management implies dealing with
changes from organizational to individual levels. As
project management approaches already provide a
framework for dealing with organizational change,
our main concern here is change induced by project’
solutions on individuals; employees are indeed
asked to change their practises, their behaviours to
enforce whatever the team project has designed or
decided to be the way to reach their goals.
As said by Nonaka, “middle hierarchy actors
hold down a job ideally located to translate and
communicate important information between
hierarchic leaders and operational teams” (Nonaka,
88). In agreement with Pettigrew (Pettigrew, 96), we
think that change mustn’t be pulled out of its initial
context in order to keep making sense. As project is
at the cross-road of organizational and individual
change, we think that project team is an appropriate
entity to manage individual changes. Having their
goals defined by high level managers, project
leaders and managers from project team have to
design an operational solution to reach them. We
assume that succeeding in reaching the project’s
goals can only be achieved if operational teams use
the designed solution, and consequently if they
effectively change.
3.2 Individual Change Management
For many authors, organizational change main
failure cause is organizational agents’ resistance to
change. For Morin (Morin, 96), these resistances are
restrictive forces that go against working situation
transformations, and new competencies acquisition.
Furthermore, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE,
2001) identified change as one of the seven main
stress factor; thus, change can be a problem for
organizational agents who live it. In order to reduce
these risks, many change management approaches
have been developed.
Change deal with phenomenon that differ a lot
by their scopes and sizes. The uniqueness of each
company, each project, creates each time unique
change conditions. Charpentier (Charpentier, 98)
underlines on this point that “the one best way”
hypothesis about managing change is false. On the
other hand, Siebenborn (Siebenborn, 05) proved that
a very methodical approach is needed to precisely
define the different definition, implementation and
ending steps of change phases.
A paradox takes shape here between the
impossibility to draw a permanently good way to
deal with change, and the need to dispose of a
concrete and precise approach
An answer can be found in Perrin-Bruneau’s
work (Perrin-Bruneau, 2005), who identified a type
of CM approach that follows either a process or
action keys and levers, called structured approaches.
The main interest is that a specific organizational
structure is set in order to deal with change during
evolution phases. This structure defines a way to
action the different keys and levers to use in relation
to the context.
One of these approaches attracted our attention.
Autissier and Moutot (Autissier & Moutot, 2003)
propose a set of tool and a generic process in order
to structure individual change during organizational
change phases. The first step consists in analyzing
how populations are impacted by change, in term of
resistance to change. The next step is a
characterization of the change’s nature, in order to
determine, in the third step, how to use each of the 3
following levers; communication (called “internal
marketing”), accompaniment, and training. The
main interest in our point view is the user-oriented
nature of these principles; this approach takes into
account the uniqueness of the change context, in
order to build a specific end-user oriented change
management solution.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORKS
We have presented in this article some materials
showing that ERP deployment project, besides being
an organizational change also represents a change
for some organizational agents. IS transformation
being managed with a project in our case study
company, we suggest that project team and project
ERP INTEGRATION PROJECT - Assessing Impacts on Organisational Agents throught a Change Management Approach
413

leader assess impacts on end user and help them
during change phases. The main argument in favour
of managing change is the resistance to change
phenomenon: this reaction can be an obstacle in
organisations’ evolutions if not properly addressed.
In order to do so, we suggest using a structured
change management approach. Indeed, these
approaches are flexible enough to take into account
the uniqueness of change, and provide a structure
and a set of tool to build a human-oriented change
management solution.
Further researches will be done on correlation
between organizational agent responses and received
change management actions; indeed, we think
impact perception could be influenced by received
training, communication and accompaniment.
Three main fields of investigation will complete
this study in our future works. The first one is the
readiness for change assessment, which importance
in the first phases of a change project has been
underlined by Zephir (Zephir et Al., 2007; Zephir,
2009). We think that this capacity evaluation should
be considered as a very important parameter in CM
process, as it helps to anticipate the potential impacts
of the change. The second field of investigation we
identified is the co-construction as presented by
Jaujard (Jaujard, 2007). This CM practise consists in
dealing with change at three levels: individuals,
groups and organisation. For each level, Jaujard
suggest to focus and work on a different part of the
occurring change. The third point we’ll need to
analyze is the possibility and the pertinence for the
company to implement action toward individuals;
the question is relevant because dealing with
individuals is more time consuming and more
complex than focusing on groups. The benefits of
building a customized change management solution
have to be assessed in regard with its costs.
Our main focus through this paper was to show
the importance of taking into account end users of a
standard in the deployment process, as this process
is in our opinion a change process for both
organizations and individuals. Our main concern is
to make easier standard deployment process for
organizations by increasing the comfort of their
employees during change phases.
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