How Changes Management Allows to Contain Risk and to Achieve Goals While an ERP Implementation Within a Company in Multicultural and International Context ?

Since the invention of the first computer in 1937 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry the process of computerisation within companies is still increasing. Nowadays, the Enterprise Resource Planning software can be seen as one of the most used software in the world. In the 1990s the price of a stock option could increase just with the public announcement of an ERP implementation within the company. It was generally synonym of rigor, data traceability, and control and best practice integration. However, in 2015 through various case studies, observations and records, we can claim that this kind of software cause a lot of changes such as organizational changes, employee's tasks changes or business practices. This paper will explain the role of Change Management during an ERP implementation project. We will analyse the importance of this management area in this kind of project and we will observe that change management has to be taken into account in order to reach objectives and containing goals. In order to illustrate this idea, we will compare two different companies. First the report of the ERP implementation will be done for the French firm EVERIAL. It summarizes 15 months of personal observations within this project where I worked as Key User implementing SAGE X3 ERP for the Purchase module April 2013 to July 2014. Then the second company is described from a case study. It is a Chinese company with Chinese business culture, which succeed first with a home custom designed ERP implementation. However it failed to implement Western ERP called SAP R3. From both EVERIAL and the Chinese company we will analyse the importance of Change Management during the implementation step. Moreover, an analysis of business culture in this kind of project will be done in order to emphasis the role of change management when Western best practices are implemented in Asian Company with a strong local culture.