Picture a textile company where the accounting manager spends months getting an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system up and running. Inventory tracking, invoicing, customer accounts — everything is configured. The reseller delivers training, printed guides are handed out. Three months later, the warehouse worker is still scribbling in a notebook, the sales rep is cutting invoices in a separate program, and the accountant is manually pulling data from two sources to put together a report. The system exists. Nobody is really using it. The problem is not the software.
This is a familiar picture in small and mid-sized businesses across Turkey. A company buys an ERP program, gets it installed, arranges training. Then it waits for the system to run itself. But ERP is not a machine that operates on its own — it is a structure where people enter data and reports come out the other end. For that structure to work, the owner — the person at the very top — needs to believe in it and take ownership of it. Technical installation is just the starting point.
Think of it this way. You give a cashier a new register. But if the manager still asks for the old paper receipt and tells the cashier to keep the old system running too, the cashier is doing two jobs. After a while, which one gets dropped? The harder one. The same thing happens with ERP. If the owner never asks for reports from the system, why would employees go to the extra trouble of entering data into it? User discipline does not appear on its own without pressure from above.
What does it actually mean for an owner to take ownership of the system? It starts here: when the owner asks ‘what were last week’s sales figures?’, the answer has to come from the program — not from a spreadsheet the accountant put together by hand. This sounds like a small habit change, but the effect runs deep. Because now the accountant has to keep that report accurate. And to keep it accurate, data has to be entered correctly. The chain works in that direction. When the owner uses the system, everyone below takes it seriously.
This does not mean the owner needs to sit at a keyboard and enter data personally. Nobody expects that. But asking for a weekly accounts receivable summary, a monthly stock report, or a list of upcoming invoice due dates — and expecting those to come from the system — is enough. Authorised resellers do not configure anything called an ‘owner module’, but in practice that is exactly how it works. Whatever the owner asks about, that part of the system gets maintained properly.
There is another side to this. When a system is first installed, some employees push back. That is normal. Their routines are changing, they have to learn new things, and they are afraid of making mistakes. Some say the program is too complicated. Others say the old way worked fine. The owner has to break through that resistance — not by shouting, but by being consistent. Saying ‘from now on, all stock movements go through the program’ and then actually enforcing it. Not allowing exceptions a month later. If the owner does not hold that line, the system quietly gets pushed into a corner and ends up as a basic accounting tool that only the bookkeeper touches.
Any small business owner who has invested in an ERP program should ask one honest question: ‘Am I actually going to use this system, or am I going to hand it off to the accountant and walk away?’ If the answer is the second one, a simpler accounting program is probably the smarter choice. But if the goal is to grow the business, stop losing stock, and stay on top of payment schedules, then ERP can deliver — on one condition: the owner has to own it. No matter how capable the software is, without commitment from the top, these programs stay on paper.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on June 11, 2001 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.