Picture a mid-sized textile factory in Bursa with 284 employees: they export fabric, the accountant works overtime every month because inventory records sit in one program, sales invoices in another, and bank movements are still entered by hand. The owner hears about a big foreign enterprise software product that manages everything in one place. He buys it. The installation team arrives. Six months later the system still isn’t fully working. What changed? In practice, nothing. The problem was never the software itself — it was that nobody adapted the software to Turkey before going live.Why does this adaptation question matter so much? Because a program written in Germany or the United States does not know Turkish tax law, Turkish accounting standards, or Turkish business habits. These systems work perfectly well in their home markets. But when installed in Turkey straight out of the box, the accountant ends up doing every job twice — once in the program, once in the ledger. ERP, or enterprise resource planning, which means software that brings all of a company’s transactions into a single computer system, only shows its real value when it is configured for the rules of the country where it runs. The argument this article makes is direct: buying a global ERP is better than doing nothing — but without proper local adaptation, the project is dead before it starts.In a Turkish ERP installation, the first place things slow down is almost always the accounting side. The Turkish Commercial Code and the uniform chart of accounts defined by the Ministry of Finance work differently from Western accounting logic. The majority of foreign programs are written around GAAP, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles used in the United States and Europe. Turkey’s uniform chart of accounts does not map one-to-one onto those frameworks. Depreciation calculations for a garment firm, progress billing for a construction company, or VAT classification for a food manufacturer — all of these require manual workarounds if the system has not been pre-configured correctly. At a flour mill in Konya in early 2001, I saw a clear example of this: the program was installed and running, but the accounting team was still preparing the VAT declaration by hand every month because the system’s VAT categories had not been structured to match Turkish regulations. The program was a capable product — it simply had not been prepared for Turkey.The second major adaptation area is currency and foreign exchange management. Turkey in 2001 is dealing with serious inflation. Companies conduct transactions in Turkish lira, US dollars, and deutschmarks or euros at the same time. Exchange rates move within a single day. Many foreign ERP systems are designed for one primary currency, or at most two. For an exporter, this creates real problems. A carpet exporter in Gaziantep selling in dollars but recording costs in lira finds that when both figures are entered into the program, the exchange rate difference is either not calculated or calculated incorrectly. Installation teams fix this through parameter settings inside the program — but those settings need to be made before data entry begins, not afterwards. Adding currency difference calculations after the fact means going back and correcting every record already in the system, which can take several months.The third important area is user habits. In Turkey, accounting and inventory management are typically handled by different people using different programs. The purchasing department keeps its own records, the warehouse uses its own card index, and the accountant manually combines everything at the end of the month. Large ERP systems require that all of these actions flow through a single screen. That represents a significant change in working habits. At a mid-sized automotive spare parts distributor in Ankara, I observed the following: the warehouse supervisor would open the program but, out of old habit, continue updating his paper notebook — and forget to enter the data into the system as well. A month later, the program’s stock figures did not match physical inventory. There was no technical fault in the software. The problem was human habit. Adaptation is not only about software settings — it also means bringing employees into the process and changing how they work day to day.The fourth adaptation area is local technical support. Major foreign ERP vendors have dealer networks in Turkey. But these dealers do not all have the same depth of technical knowledge. Some install the software and leave, and when problems arise, responses come weeks later. Some companies sign contracts without clearly defining the support terms. An Istanbul-based pharmaceutical distribution firm reported encountering 47 separate issues in the first three months after going live — most of them rooted in local configuration gaps, and the dealer had to consult the foreign headquarters each time. The firm lost weeks of productive time while accounting records remained inconsistent. Adding a clause to the purchase contract that reads ‘delivered with Turkey localization complete’ shortens this process considerably. Companies that skip this clause almost always receive an additional invoice later.So what should a business owner or manager actually do before signing a contract? Ask three questions directly. First: ‘Has this program already been configured for Turkish accounting regulations, or will we be doing that ourselves?’ Second: ‘Is there a specific module or setting for multi-currency transactions and inflation accounting?’ Third: ‘Show us Turkish reference installations — can we speak with someone at a company already running this system?’ A dealer or vendor who answers all three clearly is worth far more than one who installs quickly and disappears. Global ERP programs are genuinely capable tools. But a fully ready, out-of-the-box installation built for Turkey is still the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, you are the one who has to make the key fit the lock.
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 1, 2001. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.