Strategic objectives and top management involvement
The corporate management of each of these companies had recent encouraging
experiences with enterprise system (ES) installations at their headquarters or in
other divisions. Hence, they were favorably disposed to enterprise system solutions and
viewed integrated enterprise system as a means of improving efficiencies and
communications across all their divisions and between the divisions and
corporate headquarters. Given the fact that the main impetus for change came
from corporate headquarters it was not surprising that all projects had
widespread executive management support. However, achieving divisional
management support would prove to be more difficult.