Leveraging culture to make the system work-a case study

Samuel is a change consultant and coach, based in Salt Lake City; he has bagged a job from a Miami based firm operating in Europe and Asia.

Sammy;s first assignment is with a company in which the staff circumvents and bypasses the purchasing process. Often company staff contact vendors who supply on the basis of email commitments, and Finance is then forced to pay due to local regulations. SAP had been introduced, yet compliance is low.

Samuel has interviewed 3 people to find out why there is such a low level of compliance.
Helmut from Germany, who is on loan as a SAP consultant, claims that there is “no consequence” to by passing the system.
Wang from China claims that he gets great prices in his oral and semi clandestine dealings with vendors with whom he has been working the longest time and using SAP would only “drive the price up”.
Igor from Russia claims that “ve don’t trust the system”.

Samuel, the global consultant that he is, agrees with Helmut. There is a need for consequence for non compliance. So a process is implemented to force all vendors to re-register before any business can be done.

Yet Samuel failed to produce any change and he was fired; another consultant, who name starts with A, was hired. After a month, here is what happened-

A Chinese-American expat was sent to China and after a year, he severed  China from SAP, in coordination with the CEO.

Russian-based Igor was transferred to the Dutch office, and, removed from his vendors is under intensive scrutiny, he has  began to trust the system.

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