The appeal for ERP has vastly improved in Asia. Companies in Asia have experienced failures due to the difficulties in implementing the ERP systems and their complex nature (Yajiong et al, 2005). After careful observation of the contributing factors to ERP failures in China, the following recommendations get provided to realize ERP implementation success.
Implementation strategy
The implementation strategy for ERP vendors in the Chinese market should focus on a more localized strategy (Yajiong et al, 2005). The success of foreign ERP vendors in the Chinese market will largely depend on their ability to partner with local service providers. The foreign ERP companies need to adapt to China’s ERP market. Upon the failures of foreign ERP vendors in the Chinese market, a localized strategy should get adopted. The foreign vendors should consult with local service providers in China who are more conversant with Chinese culture. This will help guide the implementing firms (Yajiong et al, 2005). As part of their implementation strategy, the foreign ERP vendors get recommended to partner with local service providers. This strategy localizes their actions making them familiar to Chinese market and a greater chance for implementation success.
Partnering with local service providers should allow foreign vendors to limit pressures originating from Chinese culture. The localized strategy should also ensure that if foreign vendors get to partner with local service provider, training should get emphasized. Training will ensure that local service providers familiarize themselves with the ERP systems. Training ensures that the local service providers get to know their products quite well and become fully competent (Yajiong et al, 2005). This will ensure that the service providers get competent in handling the implementation of the ERP systems. For proper implementation, it gets recommended that training should be encompassed within the implementation strategy.
Level of customization
Foreign ERP vendors in the Chinese market get encouraged to develop systems that provide high end user ability (Yajiong et al, 2005). The ERP systems that get developed for the Chinese market should not be too complex to raise confusion among its users. The report and table formats should be similar to what the Chinese market is familiar to.
Alien presentation of information by foreign ERP systems contributes to failure for foreign vendors. Presentation of information directly impacts on the users. Foreign presentation styles result to user resistance (Yajiong et al, 2005). Therefore, the report and table format of the ERP systems should not be highly complex that it results to user resistance. Users need a presentation style that they are familiar to or closer to what they know. The Chinese government wants finance formats that profoundly differ to those provided by foreign ERP systems. The foreign vendors should develop ERP systems that function close with what is required in the Chinese market (Yajiong et al, 2005).
ERP Implementation failures are further contributed by the technicality involved with translation of English to Chinese. Translation gets required for user interface messages and system outputs (Yajiong et al, 2005). Translation gets extremely difficult and more than often results to errors. Direct translation of English to Chinese often makes no sense at all to native Chinese speakers in many occasions. Therefore, it gets highly recommended that considerable caution becomes exercised when translating. This should ensure that the ERP systems get to provide understandable Chinese commands, and result to high end user ability. Proper translation gets recommended as the interface created results to the system for the users. It is critical that the interface of the ERP system is understandable to the users (Yajiong et al, 2005).
Reference
Yajiong Xue, H. L. (2005). ERP implementation failures in China:case studies with implications
for ERP vendors. International journal for production economics, 1-17.
