An enterprise system has the Herculean task of seamlessly supporting and integrating a full range of business processes by uniting functional islands and making their data visible across the organization in real time. If organizations can endure the implementation cost and pain, they are rewarded with large increases in both efficiency and effectiveness.

Such an integrated system, built on one database, lets everyone instantly see data entered anywhere in the system. Drawing on five years of enterprise system implementation observations, the authors developed an informal roadmap that can help managers achieve both technical and organizational objectives and reap an enterprise system?s considerable benefits.