- 25
- September
"ERP Succeeds or Fails at the Top: Why Top Management Support Is the #1 Success Factor in Research and in Practice (2026)" — the short answer is ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the one system every department has to share, so adopting it affects everyone at once, and only the top executive can ask every department to move in the same direction. A review of 272 studies ranks top management support as the number one success factor, which matches what we have seen in more than 20 years of projects. This article explains what "support" actually requires, why one uncooperative department stalls the whole chain, and what executives must ask before signing. It follows on from our pre-implementation guide.
In one line: Executives must understand that the system changes everyone's work, support it by deciding rather than just approving the budget, and insist that every department works in the same system, because ERP is a chain: if one department does not record its step, the next one cannot work.
The examples and checklists in this article come from Grand Linux's implementation experience. Cited figures were checked on 25 September 2026. Every organisation is structured differently, so adapt them to your own context.
1. The Research and the Field Point to the Same Place
"Top management must support the project" is said so often that it sounds like a slogan. The numbers show it is not. A German research team reviewed 272 studies on ERP success factors published between mid-2012 and 2023. They found 33 distinct factors, and the one cited most often was "top management support and involvement", followed by organisational fit of the ERP system and user training [1]. The review extends an earlier one covering 1998 to mid-2012, which reached the same conclusion.
| Source | Scope | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Leyh et al. (2026) [1] | Review of 272 studies, 2012 to 2023, 33 success factors | Top management support and involvement ranks first, followed by organisational fit of the system and user training |
| Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management [2][3] | Global benchmarking of change practitioners, repeated since 1998 | Sponsorship is the number one contributor in every study. Projects with extremely effective sponsors meet objectives 79% of the time, against 27% with extremely ineffective sponsors |
| Panorama, The 2026 ERP Report [4] | 170 organisations, data collected January 2025 to January 2026 | Almost a quarter of projects ran over schedule. The most common cause was organisational issues such as governance, resistance to change and process redesign |
| Thai enterprise study (2014) [5] | 228 ERP users in a livestock and processing business in northern Thailand | Top management support had the greatest effect on user satisfaction, ahead of system quality and information quality |
Notice that the technical factors, the software, the database and the hardware, are not at the top of the table. Panorama's conclusion in the same report is that most vendors can meet baseline functionality. The problems that actually show up are unclear process ownership, poor user adoption and a lack of alignment among leaders on what the project is for [4]. Prosci adds a telling detail: half of respondents said their sponsors had less than an adequate understanding of the sponsor role [2]. They knew they had to support the project. They did not know what that meant in practice.
2. "Support" Comes in Four Levels. A Project Needs Level 3 or Above
Having worked with executives across many organisations, we see support at four levels. Each one unlocks something different.
| Level | What the executive does | What the project gets | What is still missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Approve | Signs the budget and the contract, hands the project to IT or Finance | Money and people can start | When two departments disagree, nobody decides |
| 2 Appear | Opens the kick-off, tells the meeting the project matters | Staff know the boss agrees | One speech fades fast. A 9 to 12 month project needs more |
| 3 Decide | Hears the disputes between departments, rules on which common process the organisation will follow, and owns the consequences | Blockers are cleared weekly. Design work stops looping back | Level 4 is still needed to complete it |
| 4 Use it | Approves in the system with their own account, asks for numbers from the system instead of hand-built files | Everyone knows there is no way around it. The system becomes the organisation's real data | Complete |
Levels 1 and 2 are what most organisations already do, and they are what Prosci describes as sponsors with less than adequate understanding of the role. Level 3 is where the real difference lies. An ERP implementation produces process disputes every week. Will the whole organisation use one chart of accounts? Who owns the material codes? How many approval steps does a purchase request need? None of these has a technical answer. They only have an answer about how the organisation wants to work, and only the top executive can give it. Panorama gives exactly this example: process owners who refuse a common chart of accounts force the design to be revisited again and again, and that is one of the causes of schedule overruns [4].
Level 4 connects to something we wrote about in What to Do When Executives Won't Approve in the System. If the executive lets a secretary sign on their behalf, or asks for reports to be printed and re-summarised in Excel, every employee reads the signal instantly: the system is not the real thing.
A sign the executive is at Level 4: In the management meeting, the executive opens the numbers from the system themselves. When a figure does not match what a department reported, the first question is "why is the system different", not "bring me the file instead".
3. Why One Uncooperative Department Stops the Whole Chain
This is where ERP differs from other software. The old accounting package belonged to Finance. If the warehouse never touched it, nothing broke. ERP is one system in which the output of one department is the input of the next. In Saeree ERP every module sits in a single database: budgeting, procurement, inventory, accounting and HR. A purchase request entered by the requesting unit becomes the basis for Procurement to raise a purchase order. The purchase order is the basis for the warehouse to record a goods receipt. The goods receipt is the basis for Accounting to post the payable. The payable is the basis for Finance to pay. Nothing is keyed twice. That is the benefit, but it also means that if one step is not recorded, the next step has nothing to work on.
| Step | Who records it | If this department works outside the system, the next one sees |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase request and budget check | Requesting unit | Procurement has no request to raise an order from. The budget is not reserved, so the available balance in the system is overstated |
| Purchase order | Procurement | The warehouse has no reference document when goods arrive and cannot receive them. The budget never moves from reserved to committed |
| Goods receipt and inspection | Warehouse or inspection committee | Accounting cannot post the payable because the system has no proof the goods arrived. The supplier chases payment while the system says no liability exists |
| Payable posting | Accounting | Finance has nothing to pay. The committed budget is never converted to an accrued liability |
| Payment | Finance | Accounting cannot close the period. Management sees outstanding payables that were in fact paid |
| Time and payroll | HR | Payroll entries do not post to the ledger automatically and must be keyed by hand. Staff costs in the monthly budget are incomplete |
This table is the sentence we say to every executive: one department refusing to cooperate stops the whole chain. Not because the system is strict, but because each department's data is the starting point for someone else's. Once one department starts working outside the system, the next one has to find its own workaround, and within a few months the organisation has two sets of data, one in the system and one in files, and nobody trusts either. We covered this in the hidden cost of passing Excel files around.
The core system is not a bargaining space: During implementation there will be a moment when a department asks to "keep the old way for now" or to be treated as a special case. Every process detail can be negotiated in the meeting room, except one: whether the work is recorded in the system. The impact of that decision does not land on the department asking. It lands on every department downstream. Executives who understand this allow the steps to be adjusted, but never allow anyone to step outside the system.
4. The Courage to Change: Impact Is Certain, and the Executive Has to Own It
ERP forces the organisation to agree on things it used to let vary. One chart of accounts. One set of material codes. One approval sequence. One form. Those agreements cost some departments the convenience they had. Some roles change. The person who used to be the only one who knew how something worked stops being the only one, which is good for the organisation, as we argued in When Key Staff Leave, the System Collapses. These impacts are certain. There is no way to implement without affecting anyone.
So "courage to change" does not mean the courage to buy a system. It means the courage to be the person who tells every department that from today, this is how we work. The courage to hear the complaints of the first three months without retreating to the old way. And the courage to rule when two departments arrive with arguments that both sound reasonable. Panorama found that fewer than a quarter of organisations report an intense focus on organisational change management, or OCM (Organizational Change Management), while demand for OCM services rose from 38.4% to 46.8% in a single year [4]. Many organisations learn late that the hard part was never the software.
Prosci sums up the sponsor's job in three roles that map directly onto ERP: participate actively and visibly throughout the project, not just at the kick-off; build a coalition with the other leaders so they speak with one voice; and communicate the reasons for the change to the people affected, in person [2]. The middle one matters most in practice, because department heads watch whether the other department heads are really doing it before deciding how far their own department will go.
5. For Government Agencies: Executives Rotate, the Project Must Outlast Them
Public-sector organisations carry one more condition. The top executive rotates by term or by appointment order. An ERP project that runs one to two years may well change executives midway. From our work with government agencies, four practices genuinely help.
- Anchor the project to the agency's plan, not to a person. Write the rationale and the targets into the agency's operational plan or digital plan. The incoming executive inherits it from the document and nobody has to start the explanation from scratch.
- Name a deputy-level owner to carry the baton. A deputy director or division director with a longer tenure performs the Level 3 role from the table above week to week. The top executive performs Level 4.
- Record every process decision. What was decided and why. When the new executive asks, the answer comes with its reasoning and nothing has to be reopened.
- Deliver in phases. Give each phase something real that goes live within the current executive's term. A system already in use is much harder to abandon than one still on a plan.
Details of how the system handles budgeting, procurement and regulation-based approvals for public bodies are on the Saeree ERP for Government Agencies page.
6. The Executive's Checklist Before Signing an ERP Contract
Before the contract is signed, the top executive should answer this set of questions personally. Any question without an answer means the organisation is not ready yet. Go back and fix that first. It is far cheaper than starting and stalling. The full set is in Is Your Organization Ready for ERP? 10 Questions.
| Phase | Question the executive must be able to answer | Sign that you are ready |
|---|---|---|
| Before start | Which departments will see their work change, and do those department heads know yet? | Every affected department head has sat in at least one meeting about it together, not learned by email |
| Before start | Who decides when two departments disagree, and do they have the time? | One named person, with a standing weekly slot in their calendar for this project |
| During | How many things have we agreed to do one way across the whole organisation? | Chart of accounts, material codes, approval sequence and period-close calendar are all decided before configuration begins |
| During | If a department asks to work outside the system temporarily, who can approve it, and when does it end? | Nobody, or only the top executive, with a firm end date |
| After go-live | Where will management get its numbers? | From reports in the system, and executives approve in the system with their own accounts |
| After go-live | If complaints are loud in the first three months, what will we do? | Fix the steps and the training. Do not retreat to the old way |
The rest of the preparation, master data, team and training, is in the ERP Project Preparation Checklist. How to get people to actually adopt the new system is in Change Management, and the run-up to a project is covered in What to Do When Your Organization Wants to Use ERP.
7. What We Ask of Every Saeree ERP Executive
Before every project we talk to the top executive directly about what we need from them. It is not a lot of time. It is three things, all of them.
- Understand that ERP is not Finance's program or IT's program. It is a new way of working for the whole organisation. Every module is in one database, and one department's work is another department's data.
- Support by showing up to decide when departments clash, and by using the system yourself for the parts that belong to executives: approvals and reports.
- Have the courage to change and to own the impact, because change cannot be made by one side alone. It needs the cooperation of every manager and every employee, and only the top executive can ask all of them for it at once.
Our side of the bargain is to make the executive's decisions easy. We present options with the consequences of each, rather than throwing technical questions back. Once the executive decides, we configure the system that way and record why. In projects where the executive does all three, the problems that remain are technical ones our team can fix. In projects missing any one of them, the problems become people problems, and no software fixes those. Cases abroad such as the $30 million lesson of a go-live that halted shipping for three weeks show that the damage does not stop at the IT department. It reaches sales and customers.
Conclusion
A review of 272 studies, a benchmarking series running since 1998, a 2026 industry report and a study inside a Thai enterprise all give the same answer: ERP succeeds or fails at the top. The reason is not complicated. ERP is the one system every department has to share. One department opting out stops the chain, and the only person who can ask every department to move together is the top executive. The job has three parts: understand, support by deciding and using the system yourself, and have the courage to change while owning the impact.
The core system affects everyone, so change cannot come from one side alone. The executive has to understand it, have the courage to change, and stand at the front until every department follows.
- Sureeraya Limpaibul, Managing Director, Grand Linux Solution Co., Ltd.
References
Sources checked 25 September 2026. The four-level table, the process-chain table and the checklist are the author's own proposals from implementation experience, not survey results.
- Leyh, C., Lorenz, A., Faruga, M.J., Koller, L. (2026). ERP System Implementation Projects: An Update on Critical Success Factors. In: Information Technology for Management (FedCSIS-ITBS 2024 / ISM 2024). Springer.
- Prosci. Primary Sponsor's Role and Importance (Best Practices in Change Management, 12th edition)
- Prosci. Change Management Success (79% vs 27% sponsor effectiveness)
- Panorama Consulting Group (2026). The 2026 ERP Report (170 respondents, Jan 2025 to Jan 2026)
- Duangekanong, S. (2014). Factors Influencing the Success of an ERP System: A Study in the Context of an Agricultural Enterprise in Thailand. Science, Engineering and Health Studies, 8(1).
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