Abstract:
There are numerous information systems available in the market to be selected for implementation
in manufacturing organizations. When many information systems manually intergraded for
management reporting for a company, there are high risks for accuracy of information. ERP is one
of the information systems with inbuilt capacity to integrate many parts of the functional areas that
provides meaningful information to the management. This paper describes the experiences on how
a small medium size growing roof manufacturing company in Sri Lanka problem and then
overcome in implementing ERP system. Small medium size manufacturing companies in Sri
Lanka do not normally have electronic information system in all part of business process, whereas
some processes such as production process operates outside the information system. Therefore, it
is very important to predefine what level of integration to be done, who are the related parties to
be consulted and what level of management information is required. The success of ERP
implementation is partially depending on the selection of suitable ERP system compatible with
company business process and the capability of implementation partner to map those standardized
business processes into ERP by conducting BPR. This manufacturing company has many
automated manufacturing plants with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) versions from year
1960 to 2013. When these PLCs try to integrate into ERP system, there are so many problems
faced by the company that leads up to modification of plant. Finally, company decided to
implement ERP by postponing the PLC integration. Well tested bugs free less customized SAP B1
system has been implemented to the company by monitoring progress by several log books. The
big bang approach has been followed to implement the SAP B1 system with short term parallel
run of legacy system. More importantly, top management support and motivation on change
management has fuelled up the success of the SAP B1 implementation. This paper reveals the
experience gained during the planning to implementation stages of SAP B1 that may occur in small
medium manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka.
