Difficulties in Managing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Case Study

Difficulties in Managing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems - Case Study Example The Company made approximately 6000 customizations on the SAP system, but later began experiencing challenges when Kennametal made intentions to upgrade the system. The Inflexibility occurred in the sense that; upgrading the SAP system would take too much time and efforts that supersede the benefits of the upgrade. The cost that would be incurred by the Kennametal Company to upgrade the SAP system was determined to be relatively higher as compared to the projected costs. The alignment of an organization’s processes with the Enterprise Resource Planning System enables an organization to comprehend its complicated operational processes. This enables the company to operate faster and efficiently hence improving its competitive advantage. In addition, the application of the Enterprise Resource Planning System by aligning the processes of an organization towards its procedures enables the organization to customize its activities with regard to the applications of the ERP Systems; hence creating efficiency in its operations. One of the challenges that may be faced by aligning the processes of the organization to the procedures of the ERP system is that: There may be increased costs that are incurred when the user intends to upgrade some aspects of the system. Upgrading the system may also involve consumption of high amounts of time as well as relatively higher amounts of efforts. On the other hand, there may also be high costs of maintenance associated with ERP system especially if there is a vendor involved to provide maintenance services to the ERP system. In contrast with the strategy applied by the Dana Company to maintain their Enterprise Resource System by using an external vendor, I would opt for the use of internally trained IT experts to provide maintenance services to the ERP Systems. Basically, this idea would facilitate the reduction of extra costs that may be incurred to hire an external vendor. The initial costs of training or recruiting