Mission Critical

"Idiosyncratic ways of doing business must be abandoned."

"Companies should recognize that the demands of implementing an ES are somewhat at odds with the contemporary business environment."

"Before you even decide whether an ES is a good fit for your organization and begin to plan an implementation, you need to have a lot of diverse infomation at your disposal."

"The selection of a particular vendor's ES package is something over which many firms agonize."

"It is no longer just having an ES that counts, but rather implementing it better that anyone else, or in a way that better fits a company."

"Because many companies view an ES project as just a computer system, the neither articulate their organizational objectives clearly nor manage to achieve them."

"The key to creating process-oriented information systems is an effective implementation."

"Fitting your systems to your processes is a matter of business-driven continuous improvement."

"It's impossible to redesign and fully implement new cross-functional processes in a few months."

"ES-supplied information can lead to faster and better decision making, lower management head counts, and lower costs for information reporting."

"A data-based decision to focus on cost control, for example, can lead to thousands or millions of individual behaviors to curtail spending."

"At the most fundamental level, ESs offer ways to squeeze costs out of internal supply chains operations."

"Too many firms have focused exclusively in the technical systems at the outset of their ES intitiatives, intending to build on the competitive tools down the road."

"Many companies are poised to begin to achieve strategic value from their ESs, and their business environments increasingly demand this kind of change."