Change Management: Winning Employee Buy-In for a New ERP System
warehouse staff are working around the new inventory process because nobody explained why it changed, and the promised efficiency gains never materialize because the old habits never actually went away.
6x
how much more human factors matter than technical factors in determining whether an ERP implementation delivers its promised benefits, according to Prosci's research.
Source: Prosci, via prosci.com/blog/your-erp-adoption-rate-guide
This is why Gartner's oft-cited finding that more than 70% of ERP initiatives fail to meet their original business case shouldn't be read purely as a technology problem. A meaningful share of that failure rate traces back to adoption — a system that works exactly as designed, being used incorrectly, incompletely, or not at all by the people it was built for.
The budget split between technical work and change management is dramatically lopsided relative to their actual impact on
outcomes. Source: Prosci, 2026.
What actually predicts whether people adopt a new system
Prosci's research offers a genuinely useful, counterintuitive finding here: projects that track their change management progress with rigorous, well-defined metrics are 2.5 times more likely to exceed expectations than those that don't. More surprising is what happens with weak metrics — projects using poor or vague success metrics succeed only about 7% of the time, a lower rate than projects using no formal metrics at all, which land around 26%. The lesson isn't "metrics don't matter" — it's
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