ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) AS A CHANGE MANAGEMENT TOOL

Change is not just inevitable it is rapid, frequent and full of complexity. Today's business environment is characterized by something called as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Those who don't change perish. Change is required not for growth alone, it is needed even to survive. Those who stay glued to their old, orthodox, traditional and conventional approaches either will stay mediocre or will be thrown out of the race. Resistance to change is an important management topic and has been researched in depth by academicians across the globe. The general observation as it is well known is that people by and large don't like change. ERP is one of the highly popular change management tool that has been used by companies across the globe to integrate and rationalize their processes. The legacy systems suffered from limitations. They were functioning in a stand-alone, silo mode. However, this type of working created serious problems of coordination, duplication, delays and dissatisfaction. Hence ERP emerged as a solution to seamlessly integrate things so as to make the processes smoother, quicker, leaner and robust. The data collection, storage and processing capabilities of ERP are huge and can benefit the organization not only in terms of descriptive and prescriptive analysis but can also provide ground for predictive analysis. This article discusses the concepts of change managem