Change Management: Winning Employee Buy-In for a New ERP System

Change management readiness is one of the harder things for a company to assess objectively about itself, precisely because the people closest to a project — the internal team that's been living and breathing it for months — often have the least clear-eyed view of whether adoption is genuinely on track or just looks that way in status meetings. This is one of the specific variables Orpington Technologies scores as part of its independent ERP readiness diagnostic, alongside governance, testing discipline, and data migration — precisely because change management is so consistently under-resourced and over-assumed, and because an outside, evidence-based view tends to catch adoption risk earlier than an internal team invested in the project's success is likely to catch it on its own.

Change management determines whether people actually use the new system well. The next article covers a related but more technical risk that determines whether they have accurate information to work with in the first place: data migration, and why moving historical information into a new ERP system correctly is a much harder problem than most project plans assume.