Just curious how ERP ownership is viewed out in the world. Would you say ERP in your organization belongs to (is ultimately responsible for):
ERP Ownership
- IT
- Accounting
- Senior Management
- Other
0 voters
I voted IT, but two years ago it was accounting, till my boss left the company. Basically it’s me and whatever department I happen to be assigned to.
Also some other things changed in that time, unrelated to the first reason. At first, ERP was just a curiosity in the one division so accounting had it. Now two divisions use it, and it is a much bigger share of the company’s IT infrastructure now. And we integrated with ecommerce, so uptime is more critical. And we have an IT manager that gives a hoot now.
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I voted Other:
- When it comes to Administration such as Upgrades, Task Agent, Services, Installing Modules, CSF, Uptime (SLA)… it belongs to IT.
- When it comes to Customizations, Naming Conventions, Dashboards etc it belongs to Development.
- When it comes to New Features, Training, Documenting, 3rd Level Support, Processes - Usually a ERP Governance Team with Business Analysts own that.
Usually your BSA / Governance Team would own the ERP and have the power to even change Business Processes and revamp an entire Shop Floor. Backed by of course a Steering Committee (Executives and High Ranking Managers).
In the end it all results in collaboration.
References:
- SAP Books
- 7yrs at various Publicly Traded Companies with 3K-12K Employees
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I voted Other as well. It’s a shared thing like the others have already said. As a nearly 100% MTO shop the Sales/Engineering/Production groups drive functionality changes (naming conventions, process parameters, etc.) while IT (my team) drives technology changes to deliver desired functionality. Accounting is just along for the ride to provide cost accounting and the Executive team trusts me to keep a tight reign and not let things get out of hand.
Senior management. Without the support of those folks, you’ll never complete an implementation.
I voted Other also. IT 75%, Accounting 10% Project management 15%, Senior Management “What is this Epicor invoice we keep having to pay”
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Anyone else in the other category that includes a singular manufacturing engineer that just happened to be quick on his feet?
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That’s me! BSME, but I never have actually used the degree, except to argue with our engineers.
100% of Epicor issues and admin goes to me. But I wound up in IT anyway.
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The E in ERP stands for Enterprise so the system belongs to the whole enterprise (so does collaboration software like M365). I think you get poor buy-in saying it belongs to a single department.
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I was the sole vote for Accounting. While I agree with @Mark_Wonsil that it belongs to the whole enterprise, it tends to be driven by specific departments. Every place I’ve worked, Accounting had the most control. Not that they managed it or anything, but when push came to shove, accounting would get their way.
“All departments are equal. But some are more equal than others.”
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Which are the same departments who complain, “Why is it so difficult to get buy-in from other departments? Why do they want THEIR own system?”
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A key to successfully using an ERP system is educating users why certain things are a certain way. For example, the Materials group wants to have control over Part Classes, and use them primarily for reporting. But if they don’t know that Part Classes can also drive GL transactions, they’ll totally ignore Accountings needs.
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From the start, it was high management project… (sometimes we would have prefered IT , but not often… 
) (decision process to go with Epicor and all )
But as soon as Epicor was chosen, departmental teams were created, each with the task of learning in details their assigned section (of course Accounting was for the accounting modules etc)
Doing it this way enabled The application to get acceptance as each team members were responsible to train all users under their assigned modules. So training was kind of decentralized, but doing so, allowed all users to be up and going faster. (well that was the intent… )
Not all teams were effecient, and some adjustments were made, but overall it went pretty well.
After 6 years, we kept the departmental accountability of all the processes, customizations and all… IT has not much to say besides giving opinions about some demand changes that are non-sense…
Pierre
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I worked at a company like that, each department had their own system and little to no integration between them. /ugh
This is an interesting topic, as I’ve seen it every way. As a consultant, I saw a lot of accounting folks taking the reigns, once even usurping the IT department from responsibility. At my current company, it was driven by accounting but is now under IT/Senior Management.
Every department gets their own say in how they run operations/process but changes must be thoroughly vetted. This means IT isn’t just a workhorse and gets a say.
My 2c It depends… How big, cloud vs on-prem, and the level of skill and talent there is at hand and the willingness the business is to adopt change and support a team of specialists to help them on their journey.
I was given this at my first ever ERP/System Administrators job by the CEO of the company I was employed by all the way back in the late 90’s.
I kind of feel that IT should be really just be involved in the infrastructure of the ERP system. They should most definitely be included when it comes to laying out business processes, but only to provide guidance as to what the ERP system (and your own network) can or can’t do. They shouldn’t be designing the business processes any more than they would be laying out the templates for your corporate word docs. Yes, they should control those word doc templates, but not be responsible for their content.