ERP projects in China almost invariably failed to be completed within the scheduled time frame, but only rarely did they exceed the planned budget. Additional people and materials were often reallocated to the projects during implementation, but this was usually done on an informal basis. Official budgets were unaffected. I observed ERP project managers calling in personal favors from their colleagues or promising them future considerations. Informal resource reallocation is prevalent in Chinese organizations, but inconsistent with the formalization paradigm of ERP.

Secondly, ERP projects rarely improved cycle times or customer satisfaction. Instead, the major benefits were reductions in unit labor costs and/or inventory levels. The Chinese organizations implementing ERP often reorganized task responsibilities and/or consolidated key processes. However, they were rarely able to improve their responses to customer needs. Response time reductions were less than 10% in all eight cases (and for over 95% of survey respondents). This raises questions about the value of ERP in dynamic environments that reward flexibility rather than efficiency.

The third similarity provides a cautionary note for all IT specialists. Projects initiated by IT personnel (such as the CIO or IT manager) were much less likely to be successful than those begun by general management-the big boss in the hierarchical Chinese organization. Top management initiated ERP projects in five of the eight cases. Four of these were successful implementations. In contrast, all three cases initiated by IT managers were failures.

The big boss's authority was often critical to move an ERP project forward and overcome resource bottlenecks along the way. In contrast, disputes between functional managers emerged frequently in ITinitiated projects. Even the top IT manager in a Chinese organization seldom had the political clout and extensive business knowledge to resolve these disputes and make ERP a success.

Successful ERP implementations in China tend to be initiated by top management, planned ahead of time (ensuring their feasibility), and tightly controlled during implementation. Despite these commonalities, I found eight fundamental differences between ERP implementations in China's SOEs and PVs.