Wachs boils it down. "Top management calls this inefficiency. The lower guys call it stupidity. When you have five different pricing models, it creates inconsistencies," he says.

The integration meeting plods along, led by Bockstedt, the former CIO of Celanese’s Ticona plastics business (where he oversaw that SAP deployment). Today, the team is checking progress on tasks such as batch determination and demand forecasting. The accounts payable scanning feature is late. The team says it will call a consultant who already wrote 3,000 lines of code that was supposed to make that feature work. Bockstedt presses, "Should we descope it?" Representatives from the finance group convince Bockstedt to keep it in scope for now.

True Integration Requires Faith

There’s something religious about embracing ERP. It requires faith that the destination will justify a long period of sacrifice and change. And it requires discipline.

The late ’90s were secular, and its distinctions?independence, entrepreneurship, decentralization?can be seen as euphemisms for what was really going on: an utter lack of discipline. Instead of adapting to ERP, large companies bought ERP, hired consultants, dismantled the software and rebuilt it to fit existing business processes. They were designing religious tenets around how they lived rather than living by religious tenets.

The Celanese ERP rollup is about rediscovering religion. Instead of tailoring software to the business, the business conforms to the software. Of course, that deliberately brings pain, as Carlson noted, and demands that people change. The obvious risk here is that too much pain can maim or kill the organization, that is, if the company can even find the discipline it lacked in the first place.

Wachs says he’ll know when discipline flags. "If we tolerate business units explaining why their outputs are different so that they don’t have to change their inputs, then we have lost," he says. "The mistake of the past was trying to adapt software to the business."

Eventually, the integration meeting gets stuck in the mud. Sensing this, Bockstedt gives it a push. "This is what you’ve agreed to do over the next week," he says, calling up another spreadsheet. "It’s quite a bit." For a while no one speaks. SCEM is still hanging out there, unresolved. Finally, one staffer speaks up: "We’ve communicated with SAP by phone. By e-mail. We got no response. Should we send Karl in to do something?"

Leaning back in his chair, Bockstedt says, "I think it’s time to pull the trigger on that."