Managing IT Change—Sales, Marketing, and Distribution

• Author: Art Worster,Frank Andera,Thomas R. Weirich
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22159
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016

37

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22159

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Managing IT Change—Sales,

Marketing, and Distribution

Art Worster, Thomas R. Weirich, and Frank Andera

Over the past

four articles

(“IT Applica-

tions and Managing

Change,” September/

October 2015; “Man-

aging IT Change—A

New Role for HR,”

November/ December

2015; “Managing

IT Change—Fully

Integrated Manu-

facturing: Impacts

on Manufacturing,”

January/February

2016; “Managing IT

Change— Financial

Management,”

March/April 2016),

we have discussed

ways in which

the transition to

integrated business systems

affects overall strategic and

financial management of a

business. We first

laid out the changes

in fundamental

thought processes

that have to occur in

order to fully under-

stand the dynamics

of what changes,

why these changes

are logical neces-

sities (rather than

choices), and what

has to be undertaken

to use enterprise

resource planning

(ERP) applications

to their full effect.

We have covered HR,

Manufacturing, and

Financial systems

(recording, organiz-

ing, reporting, and

analytics). In this

article, we will com-

plete the core enter-

prise functions that

are interconnected

to make business

processes either work

productively or pre-

vent their effective-

ness, by looking at

the Sales and Marketing func-

tion. In doing so, we will take a

specific example of a common

In the past, all of the budgeting and reporting

required to manage information technology (IT)

change for sales, marketing, and distribution was

extremely tedious and often could not provide

the needed level of accuracy to make the evalua-

tion process work properly. It was considered too

complex to accurately budget for and evaluate the

success of each promotion. Today, with the cross-

functional breadth of enterprise resource planning

applications, this is simply no longer the case.

It is also the case that many promotions will be

essentially identical across the company or across

different geographies. This allows for the reuse of

much of the work required to design the collection,

evaluation, and reporting process. It does, however,

require significant work for management accoun-

tants to work with each of the other functions within

the business to work through detailed algorithms

such that changes in production and/or sales

volumes can be analyzed and all of the true costs

associated with each of these promotions can be

identified. These are all opportunities for more ana-

lytical approaches to management afforded by the

conversion to integrated business system design

and the implementation of enterprise resource plan-

ning applications. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This is the fifth install-

ment in a series of articles

that have appeared and

will appear in the com-

ing issues of JCAF. Art

Worster and his associates,

Thomas R. Weirich and

Frank Andera, address

matters that arise during

and after the implemen-

tation of integrated IT

applications in a business.

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