Cultural challenges in ERP rollouts

Change Management Challenges in ERP rollout:

Change management is a key area when it goes for ERP roll-out especially SAP roll-outs. The business organisation will be working totally in a legacy way and all of sudden if they want to move SAP then lots of resistance will be coming from the end user or key user community. How to overcome this challenge will be interesting. Below are some of the approaches which could give some results.

Approach:

Strong leadership qualities:

General human tendency is to resist if there is any change in the current practice. User community will put of pressure back to rollout team in non accepting the processes, not cooperating with rollout team to do testing and validating etc. Spread negative vibe to other regions and make life complicated for the rollout team.

Here the situation leadership qualities are very much required. Change manager must understand the dynamics of the situations and encourage the user community to get participate in the journey. There should be many awareness programs organised to make user community in understanding of the benefits of the new process and system. Regular campaigns to be organised to strengthen to connect to the user community. Wherever required the change manager must take strong decision for the benefit of the project.

Cultural understanding:

Cultural understanding is must as the team will be comprises of different region, language, countries etc. There should be a ice break sessions or project initiation and acceleration workshops to be organised. These workshops will be break the initial hiccups and makes the way for understanding of each other. This gives avenues for the rollout team on how to come with the strategy during the rollout period.

Winning the heart of key users:

Winning the heart of key users is possible if the rollout team really mingles with the user community. The approach must be applying so more soft skill approach. There should be a fine balancing required between the technical and soft skills.  

Challenges in Mass Transportation System

Background:

Most of the cities in India has grown in an unimaginable growth over the last 20 years. More or more peoples are migrating from rural areas to urban areas due to better job opportunity. and improved life style. Because of this there is lot of movement happening between the peoples.

Problem:

Challenge 1: Poor quality of roads

The quality of the roads are of poor quality due to which the vehicles has to move slow. An average a person has to waste 2 to 3 hrs average every day.

Challenge 2: Narrow roads

Because a sudden growth most of the arterial roads are narrow where as the vehicles are more. The ratio between the road capacity and vehicles is very high where traffic congestion is more/high.

Challenge 3: No driver discipline

There is a big cultural challenge with drivers. Lane discipline is not followed in many of the circumstances. This lead to lots of chaos in the roads.

Solutions:

The quality of the roads have to be increased. High quality standard to be set so that the contractor strictly follows the high standards. If there are any quality compromises then Govt must ensure that the standards are followed and practiced

There should be a good coordination across the different Govt. departments. This ensures loss in translation and gives better results.

Govt should implement good traffic management system to ensure smooth movements in the road. There should be a clear demarcation of medians, platforms and traffic signals for smooth movements.

Lane discipline should be followed as habit by everyone so that the accidents are avoided and human injuries or lives are saved.

Parking Chaos and Solutions In India

Background:

After opening up new economy policies in India in 1991 more or more investments started coming up in India which lead to change in the life style of middle class. More or more middle class were moved from middle class to upper middle class in the layer. The purchasing capacity has been increased for these so called upper middle and the passenger car sales between 1991 and 2015 has been increased by more than 100%. This is good for the country's economic growth on the other hand it had also created challenges in the areas of traffic congestion and parking congestion.

Problems:

The metropolitan cities Chennai, Delhi, Kolkatta, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad has a huge challenge in controlling and monitoring the traffic congestion and parking congestion due to the fact of narrow roads and in efficient traffic management system. This lead to an average of 1.5 to 2 hrs every day during peak hours (7:30 AM to 10:30 AM and 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM) one has to spend/waste time.

Most of the cities are not equipped with good parking system in place and they park the vehicles in the side of the road where they create a traffic congestion till it is parked. This has lead to lot of stress to both drivers as well the traffic police men.

Solutions:

To overcome the situations there should be an efficient parking system by involving sensors with good data analytic. The solution is that parking bay should be equipped with sensor which is integrated to the central system. When the vehicle is parked in/out in the bay the details are captured and stored in the system. This gives information to the central system on the availability. This information can be shared to a Mobile app or can be displayed in some of the hot spots where the drivers can find where the parking space is available.