GET TOGETHER
A Case of ERP Implementation and its Transfer to Class
Johan Magnusson, Håkan Enquist
Centre for Business Solutions, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 605, Gothenburg, Sweden
Anders Gidlund, Bo Oskarsson
SYSteam AB, Gothenburg, Sweden
Keywords: ERP, Implementation, Education, User involvement.
Abstract: Regardless of how well designed and functioning the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is, the
dimensioning factor for ERP utilization will be the users themselves. In this paper, we report from a case
study of a medium-sized manufacturing company that took an alternative approach to their ERP
procurement and implementation. Through involving multiple process owners in a series of workshops with
the scope of specifying the as-is and to-be process of the business, the company focused on getting the users
involved from the start. A selection of the findings in this case has been used as inspiration for a course-
module for teaching ERP, and this paper reports from the case and the transfer of experience into class.
1 INTRODUCTION
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects are
illustrious for going over budget, under scope and
over time (Davenport, 1998; Upton & Staats, 2008).
Gartner Group (Ganley, 2008) report that in 85% of
all the implementations, the projects failed to deliver
on time, scope and budget.
The reason for this high degree of failure can be
found in the complex nature of the projects. Through
involving both changes on the business process- as
well as the information technology (IT) side, the
projects are associated with a high risk of failure
(Aladwani, 2001; Sammon & Adam, 2010; Hakim
& Hakim, 2010).
To alleviate this high risk of failure, researchers,
consultants and professional analysts alike have
studied what they refer to as “critical success
factors” of ERP implementations. The number of
research articles within this tradition have, however,
suffered from being overly normative and at many
times devoid of empirical foundation (Hong & Kim,
2002; Kumar et al, 2003).
Regardless of this, the “common ground” when
it comes to CSFs for ERP implementations include
explicit top management support, flexibility in
additional funding, and user involvement (Ganley,
2008).
Following up on the last of these CSFs (user
involvement), we have conducted a case study of a
Swedish medium-sized manufacturing company.
After conducting the case study, we transferred the
results into the design of a course module for
teaching ERP. This course module was implemented
into the curriculum from November 2008.
Several researchers have spent a considerable
amount of time and effort in integrating ERP into the
curriculum of higher education (David et al, 2003;
Hawking et al, 2002; Hayen & Andera, 2005;
Magnusson et al, 2009; Nelson, 2002; Roseman et
al, 2001; Wixom, 2004). This article aims to
contribute to this tradition.
The purpose of this paper is to report some of the
findings of the case, together with the design of the
course module.
2 METHOD
The case was selected for the company’s successful
ERP procurement and implementation. This level of
success was based on their own assessment.
507
Magnusson J., Enquist H., Gidlund A. and Oskarsson B. (2010).
GET TOGETHER - A Case of ERP Implementation and its Transfer to Class.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 507-512
DOI: 10.5220/0002866305070512
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

The company (Hestra Inredning AB, Hestra) is a
medium.sized, family-owned manufactory company.
Being formed in 1900, it is one of Scandinavia’s
leading actors within the shop-fitting sector.
The case study involved a short pre-study where
respondents in the form of one consultant and one
representative of the company were approached to
give introductory information and potential access to
the company.
After this, on-site interviews with five
representatives of the company followed. The
interviews were semi-structured and took
approximately one hour to conduct. The interviews
were sound-recorded and fragments that were
regarded to be of particular interest to the
researchers were transcribed.
Following this, a short description of how the
company went about with their procurement and
implementation was constructed, and this
description was sent back to the respondents for
feedback. After taking the feedback into account and
altering the description, the researchers continued to
transform the case into a methodology for teaching
ERP. This resulted in a course module that was
implemented for the first time in 2008.
3 THE CASE OF HESTRA
In the fall of 2005, the Chief Financial Officer of
Hestra was at wits end in regards to what the
company should do with their current ERP system.
The current system (Intentia (Lawson) Movex) had
been installed in 1998, and had since proved to be
difficult to manage and in dire need of an upgrade.
After a brief analysis of what the costs of the
necessary upgrade would be, an alternative plan was
set into effect.
The company’s idea was to investigate the pre-
requisites for the procurement of a new ERP system.
After initial discussions with a local consulting firm,
the idea arose that any steps towards a new ERP
system would require a thorough analysis of the
current operations.
Hestra was currently organized in a process
oriented manner. For Hestra, this entailed having
organized their operations into production-related
and supporting processes, and with individual co-
workers assigned roles of process-owners.
The process-oriented approach was initiated as
an effect of demands from the customer side, where
Hestra had to comply with environmental standards
in order to maintain their Tier 1 status. This involved
adhering to process standards such as ISO9000 and
ISO14000, which put a strong emphasis on the link
between documentation and the current (factual)
process configuration.
Even though Hestra had been working for quite
some time in a process-oriented manner, there was a
lack of overall business understanding. The process
owners were well adept and fully in tune with their
individual processes, yet after a short evaluation in
December 2005, it quickly became apparent that the
hand-off between the different processes was not
explicitly known.
3.1 Mapping the Processes
In June 2006, the sub-process owners were brought
together to specify the as-is and the to-be processes.
The idea behind this was that a large portion of the
benefits of the ERP implementation would become
visible in the hand-offs between the different sub-
processes, and not only through making the sub-
processes themselves more efficient.
Hence, a series of workshops were held where
the sub-process owners were asked to describe their
processes to the rest of the owners. This was
intended to awaken discussion in regards to how the
process was configured and what possible issues
could be found in the current configuration.
In retrospect, the sub-process owners all saw this
as somewhat of a break-through for operations.
Previously, they had been highly adept in their own
process, yet at the same time they were unaware of
what the implications of hybrid routines and
improvisation would be for the activities further
down the stream.
This series of workshops resulted in a higher
joint understanding and common ground in regards
to what the business process really was at Hestra.
All the participants in the workshops were given a
heightened understanding of how value was created
at Hestra. At the same time, they reported a higher
level of involvement in the daily operations, along
with a strong will to work for constant process
improvement.
The explicit results of the workshops were
process maps of the five key processes for Hestra.
This collection of process maps was then handed
over to three previously selected ERP system
vendors (Lawson, Microsoft and Jeeves) as the main
part of the requirements specification.
3.2 Procurement and Implementation
The instructions for the ERP vendors was that they
should show how their product would be able to
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support the five identified processes according to the
specified configuration. This was done in the form
of a series of workshops where the vendors
demonstrated their products directly in the
processes.
Out of the short-listed vendors, only one was
seen as complying with the requirements specified
by Hestra. This was due to that the bulk of vendors
stuck to a traditional functional description of what
the ERP system could do, and did not amply respond
to the process oriented requirement specification.
By early fall of 2006, an agreement was reached
between Hestra and one of the ERP vendors. Since
the sub-process owners had been so involved in the
requirements specification, the next step was to
assign them the roles of power-users in the new
system.
This involved increasing the product specific
knowledge of the sub-process owners so that they
would be able to assist in the roll-out of the new
system. The training was conducted between
February and June 2007, and one of the outcomes of
this was a unique set of training material and user
instructions for Hestra.
Since the sub-process owners were well adept
with both the processes and the system, they were
asked to take over the creation of user instructions.
This was seen as an important step to avoid any
lock-in and dependency of external consultants.
The ERP system was put into operations in
December 2007, after a continuous and automatic
conversion of the necessary posts and master data.
This entailed that the new system was run in the
background, with the same data as the original
system. Through working with two parallel systems,
the go-live was not a traditional go-live with all the
associated risks, but rather a shut-down of the old
system and a continued operations in the new. This
resulted in the switch being almost completely free
from the traditional problems and risks.
3.3 Transferring the Experience into
an Educational Setting
After going through the case of Hestra, a group of
consultants and lecturers started to exchange ideas
about if and how some of the experiences made
could be transferred over to an educational setting.
It quickly became apparent that the lessons
learned from Hestra could be transferred into
courses involving elements of ERP training. After
careful consideration, the group arrived at the
following list of assumptions for integrating the
lessons learned from Hestra into a course module for
ERP education:
 A process-oriented approach could be used to
shift the pedagogical focus from technical
exercises to an increased understanding of the
business and the integrated nature of ERP
systems
 The users should have an overall process to work
with, and be put in charge of sub-processes
 The users should explain what their sub-process
is to other users working on the same overall
process but with adjacent sub-processes
 The users should explain how their sub-process
utilizes the functionality of the system
 The users should be engaged to discuss the
potential shortcomings and risks associated with
using the ERP system as process support
In 2008, a course module was designed and
implemented into an existing course on ERP systems
at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The
lessons learned from this experience were reported
by Magnusson et al (2009) and involved both
technical and pedagogical aspects that needed
improvement. Overall, the result of the first attempt
at implementing the module into the curriculum was
regarded to be a success (Magnusson et al, 2009).
Following up on this success, a new attempt was
made in the fall of 2009. In this course (“Applied
Enterprise Systems”) the students were divided into
groups of 5-8 students and attributed roles following
the illustration below. They were then given a set of
exercises that involved them running both the entire
order-to-cash cycle by themselves, and, focusing
more in detail on their particular sub-process and the
functionality utilized for running this sub-process.
After an introduction to the system (this was the
first time the majority of the student body came in
contact with this particular system), the students
were given access to a Software-as-a-service
environment where the ERP system was
implemented.
The first exercise that the students completed
was a full order-to-cash cycle with the case of a
business opportunity appearing at a trade fair. They
then managed the customer, placed the order and
made sure that the order was delivered and an
invoice sent to the customer. This involved several
different user roles, whereby the first instance of the
system had the role of “CEO”, so that the students
had full access to the functionality.
The second exercise involved the students being
assigned particular roles (marketing assistant, et
cetera), where they had to go deeper into the
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509

Figure 1: Processes, functions and roles.
particular functionality that their role had access to.
In tandem with this, they were given access to a
process-portal where the complete process that their
particular role was part of became visible for them.
Throughout the exercise, the students had full
access to the user instructions and system
documentation, and consultants were on site to
answer any questions that might arise.
After these two exercises, a debriefing was
scheduled. Working with lessons learned from the
previous attempt, the lecturers decided to conduct
the de-briefing without involving the students in
running the system on stage. Instead, one consultant
took charge of running the entire process, and a
lecturer was in charge of engaging the class in a
discussion.
This discussion was considered valuable through
the different questions that were raised. The students
were given an increased understanding of how both
a company and an ERP system works. With this de-
briefing conducted in the last week of class, it was
considered to be a usable method for going through
all the learning objectives of the course.
4 DISCUSSION
As shown in the case of Hestra, an early
involvement of the users into the ERP procurement
and implementation process was considered to be a
major success-factor for the company. Taking the
experience from Hestra as a starting point for the
design and implementation of a course-module on
ERP, the group of lecturers and consultants worked
with a set of assumptions. In Table 1, the lessons
learned related to each of these assumptions is
presented.
As a side note, the implications of taking a
starting point in a case of ERP procurement and
implementation that differs from the main stream
has several implications. On the one hand, it could
be seen as ethically questionable, since the students
are introduced to a style of procurement and
implementation that differs from much of what is
currently the de-facto standard. Since the students
are not adept with ERP procurement and
implementation, they are not in a position where
they can question the approach. At the same time
there is a lack of research showing that this approach
is advisable for organizations.
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Table 1: Assumptions and Lessons-learned.
Assumptions Lessons-learned
A process-oriented approach could
be used to shift the pedagogical
focus from technical exercises to an
increased understanding of the
business and the integrated nature of
ERP systems
The process-oriented approach aids the students in attaining a
higher level of knowledge on the links between the business and
ERP system. The experience is initially highly difficult for the
students, if they lack practical business understanding.
The users should have an overall
process to work with, and be put in
charge of sub-processes
The overall process needs to be communicated in a manner that
allows the students to navigate and explore the process
themselves. Process mapping tools such as Visio and work-flow
tools provide one means for achieving this. This process should
have the overall as well as all sub-processes fully specified, with
user instructions integrated so that the students have to start with
the process and then move towards the functionality.
The users should explain what their
sub-process is to other users
working on the same overall process
but with adjacent sub-processes
This proved to be asking too much of the students, and during the
second implementation of the course-module this was avoided.
Instead a consultant was set to in front of the group run through
the process and sub-processes and allow the students and faculty
to ask questions. This proved to be a better approach for reaching
the learning objectives of the course-module.
The users should explain how their
sub-process utilizes the
functionality of the system
See above.
The users should be engaged to
discuss the potential shortcomings
and risks associated with using the
ERP system as process support
This proved to be a great means for achieving the overall
learning objectives of the course on ERP systems. A number of
interesting and thought-provoking questions arose during the
debriefing that aided the students in acquiring a more thorough
understanding of the limitations and potential of ERP systems.
On the other hand, it could be considered a
means of showing the students that there are
multiple means of approaching the difficulties
associated with ERP procurement and
implementation. Provided that there is time for a
discussion in regards to the singularity of this
approach, related to an overall ERP discussion and
that the students are given the possibility of
reflecting about the process, this is not considered to
be a substantial draw-back of the approach.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the respondents and
management team of Hestra for allowing us to
access their organization for our research.
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