Managing IT Change—Sales, Marketing, and Distribution

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 evaluation 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 accountants 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 analytical approaches to management afforded by the conversion to integrated business system design and the implementation of enterprise resource planning applications.