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You are Project Manager of an e-procurement implementation. How would you maximize the acceptance of the new system among staff?

Marks: 10 M

Year: Dec 2013, May 2014

1. Definition:

   “Managing process, structural, technical, staff and cultural change within an organization is referred to as Change management”.

2. Different aspects of change to be considered:

   i. Scheduling: What are the suitable stages for introducing change?

   ii. Budgeting: How do we host e-Business?

   iii. Resources needed: What type of resources do we need, what are their responsibilities and where do we obtain them?

   iv. Organizational structures: Do we need to revise organizational structures?

   v. Managing the human impact of change: What is the best way to introduce large scale e-Business changes to employees?

   vi. Technologies to support e-Business change: The roles of knowledge management, groupware and intranets are explored.

3. Diagram:

• The above figure show key aspects or levers of change that needs to be assessed to maximize the benefits of e-business. The main change levers are:

1. Market and business model.
2. Business process
3. Organizational structure, culture and staff responsibilities.
4. Technology infrastructure changes.

• These are all the major changes that are required in order for an organization to be agile enough to respond to marketplace changes and deliver and deliver competitive customer service. To help achieve these different aspects of change, a series of success factors see to be required. These include:

  • Management buy-in and ownership
  • Effective project management
  • Action to attract and keep the right staff to access the change.
  • Employee ownership of change.

  4. The challenges of sell-side e-commerce implementation:

  A useful framework for reviewing an organizations capability to manage e-Business related change also called as 7S framework can be described as follows:

  i. Strategy: The contribution of e-Business in influencing and supporting organizations strategy

  ii. Structure: The modification of organizational structure to support e-Business.

  iii. Systems: The development of specific processes, procedures or information systems to support internal marketing.

  iv. Staff: The breakdown of staff in terms of their background, age, sex and characteristics such as IT vs. marketing, use of contractors/consultants.

  v. Style: Includes both the way in which key managers behave in achieving the organization’s goal and cultural style of the organization as a whole.

  vi. Skills: Distinctive capabilities of key staff, but can be interpreted as specific skill sets of team members.

  vii. Superordinate: The guiding concepts of e-commerce organization which are also part of shared values and culture. The internal and external perception of these goals may vary.

  5.Different types of change in Business:

  i. Incremental change: This type of change requires relatively small adjustments required by changes in the environment.

  ii. Discontinuous or transformational change: Involves a major change in the business environment which changes the basis for competition.

  iii. Anticipatory change: This type of change occurs when an organization makes proactive changes in order to improve its efficiency or to create an advantage within an operational environment.

  iv. Reactive Change: The reactive change is a direct response to change in the external environment.

  v. Organizational Change: It includes both discontinuous and incremental changes to an organization. The four different forms of organizational change are:

  • Tuning
  • Adaptation
  • Re-orientation
  • Re-creation

To succeed in e-procurement implementation, the following steps can be followed by project managers to maximize acceptance of new system among staff:

1. Clarify goals: Businesses should make sure that the business problem or goal is well defined and understood. Project managers need to ask themselves what are the functions they are trying to improve and are the goals clearly defined and reachable.

2. Construct a process audit: After setting the goal, businesses should analyze their current procurement process. Businesses should first determine what kind of purchasing is the solution targeted to support: direct or indirect. For a business to realize maximum value from an e-procurement initiative, the whole purchasing process must be evaluated to determine if it needs to be reengineered.

3. Create a business case for e-procurement: Setting up a business case for e-procurement implementation can be useful, as it forces the company to systematically analyze the business. There has been a problem in measuring the value of IT investments and in building a business case for such investments. This derives from the fact that, in many cases the benefits from implementing an e-procurement solution are intangible and non-financial therefore some traditional accounting based-methods such as ROI are not able to capture.

4. Develop a supplier integration matrix: Without supplier commitment and involvement, the e-procurement project is useless. Companies should develop a supplier integration matrix. The matrix helps determine what kind of relationship is best for individual vendors. Involving suppliers in organizations e-procurement deployment is important, since it also has a significant impact on suppliers IT-infrastructure and strategy. Neglecting the impact of suppliers in company’s e-procurement deployment may lead to the failure of the whole project.

5. Select an e-procurement application: There is a variety of different e-procurement applications for companies to choose from. By categorizing the products and services purchased, companies can more easily decide on the required procurement strategies and e-procurement applications. Four questions that managers should think about, in order to define the right application for their company:

6. Will it support my procurement process?
7. Does it leverage my other application investments?
8. Will it work seamlessly with other applications?

9. Is it extendable?

10. Educate: Redesigning the procurement process and influencing end-user behaviour towards the new procedures and business rules is one of the most critical factors in a successful e-procurement implementation. Change tends to generate resistance and managers should deal with it by communicating and encouraging employees to comply with the new guidelines Providing information about their spend to employees encourages them to take ownership of savings targets with the use of re-engineered procurement processes.