Picture the accounting manager of a textile company. After years of working with familiar ledgers and his own system, he is switching to a new program. The software comes from a foreign vendor; the menus are translated into Turkish, but the way it works feels different. Within the first week, the manager starts complaining: ‘This program does not fit the way we work.’ But does it really not fit, or is it just that old habits are resisting change? Without asking this question, managing an ERP (enterprise resource planning) project correctly is nearly impossible.
When an international ERP program arrives in Turkey, some things must be changed. The chart of accounts required by the Turkish Commercial Code, invoice details governed by the Tax Procedure Law, the Turkish Lira and kuruş number format, payroll calculations compatible with SSK (Social Insurance Institution) declarations — these are mandatory adaptations. The program must comply with Turkey’s legal framework on these points. Otherwise your accounting records become invalid and you face problems at the tax office. These kinds of adaptations are non-negotiable.
But then there is this: the invoice numbering system the company has used for decades, the way customer codes are written, the order in which reports appear on screen. These also end up on the ‘must be adapted’ list. The software firm tries to meet every request, the project drags on, costs rise. What you end up with is no longer a standard ERP — it has turned into a custom piece of software patched together around one company’s habits. This is one of the most common mistakes in ERP projects.
Separating mandatory adaptation from habit-driven adaptation requires asking just one question: ‘If we do not make this change, will we face a legal problem, or will we simply lose our old way of doing things?’ If the answer is a legal problem, the adaptation is necessary. If the answer is habit, it is smarter to keep the program’s standard workflow intact. Because the standard workflow is how that software performs best. It is the process the vendor has spent years developing, correcting, and improving. Once you break it, problems during future updates become almost certain.
Here is a concrete example. For stock tracking, the program records inventory at the warehouse level. But the company had always kept each warehouse in a separate ledger, and the staff were used to it. The manager says the program should work their way. Yet the program’s warehouse-based stock management actually offers a cleaner and faster solution. The right move here is not to change the program but to get the staff comfortable with how the program works. A week of training usually solves this. But without that training, the change request goes on the list and inflates the project budget.
There is a real obstacle standing in front of ERP projects in Turkey: the communication gap between the local reseller and the software vendor. The local reseller has to pass every customer request up to the vendor, and the vendor has no way of knowing which requests are genuinely required. As a result, some projects run months past their delivery date. The way to prevent this is to draw up an ‘adaptation list’ at the start of the project and write next to each item either ‘legal requirement’ or ‘habit request.’ This list guides both the company’s management and the software firm.
When selecting and implementing an ERP program, keep this criterion in mind: for compliance with Turkish regulations, ask the software vendor or authorized reseller directly and request reference customers. Find out how other Turkish companies use that program for invoice formats, chart of accounts, and payroll calculations. Be ready to change your habits, not the program. Get written commitments for mandatory adaptations and attach those commitments to the contract. With this kind of approach, your project finishes on time and you will not have headaches when updates come around later.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 19, 2003 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.