Implications for

Management
Outsourcing
• Determine how much the company should rely on outsourcing
and the extent to which they do.
• Re-evaluate the level of support required for the ERP
implementation.
• Evaluate Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and hosted
applications for key business processes.
• When considering outsourcing solutions (whether they be
offshore development or SaaS providers), ERP management
teams need to look beyond cost.
Ethics

• Ethics should be a major concern of the ERP implementation team.

• An ethics guru should be appointed to the team to guide the team
on privacy, accuracy, property rights, and access principles.
• Setting high ethical standards during and after ERP
implementation will prevent data mining from identifying
individual consumer identities.
Legal

• Address as many possible legal issues up front to protect the

company’s investing in the ERP.
• Contracts must be scrutinized by both the legal department and
the project director, project manager (PMO), or both.
Audit

• Key issue for management with ERPs in general is the law around
Sarbanes–Oxley.
• It has had a big impact on systems as it is related to the integrity
and completeness of controls and processes that are oftentimes
coded into the ERP.
• As the SOX law continues to be clarified in the courts and
therefore in compliance, it will continue to have impacts on
existing and new systems.
• Changes are often required to ensure that compliance is reached.
Security

• Securing an ERP system is complex and requires good technical

skills as well as communication and awareness.
• In the case of systems connected to the Internet, the weakest link
may not even be the company’s employee, but rather someone
else that has been given access to the system for e-commerce
purposes.
• A security plan must be developed to address all the issues related
to access.