In Pakistan’s rapidly evolving business landscape, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become essential for streamlining operations across both the public and private sectors. Yet the landscape is littered with projects that failed to deliver their promised value—from government departments to private enterprises.
Research examining Pakistani organizations reveals that ERP adoption is not only complex but involves significant financial investment, making project failure a risk that organizations cannot afford. When Birmingham City Council’s £170 million Oracle disaster makes international headlines, Pakistani business leaders must ask: could this happen here? The answer, unfortunately, is yes—and it does.
But here’s the hard truth: the software isn’t the problem.
At Secure Logic Consulting, we’ve analyzed ERP implementations across Pakistan’s industrial landscape to understand what really goes wrong. Our research reveals that ERP failure in Pakistan stems from distinct local challenges that global literature often overlooks.
The Five Root Causes of ERP Failure in Pakistan
1. The End-User Training Gap
Academic research investigating ERP success in Pakistan reveals a critical finding: end-users need proper training to use ERP systems effectively—and they need computer literacy training before they receive software interface training.
Unlike Western contexts where digital literacy is assumed, Pakistani organizations face the reality that many users lack foundational computer skills. Compounding this problem, most end-users do not have training manuals available to learn existing or new tasks. Managers often remain unaware of ERP usability issues, believing it is simply “the will of end-users” to adapt.
The symptom: Expensive ERP software deployed to users who cannot navigate basic computer functions, with no printed manuals and error messages written in technical language that confuses rather than helps.
2. Process Blindness in Pakistani Organizations
Organizations attempt to digitize broken workflows. If your order-to-cash process relies on clerks shuffling files—a common sight in Pakistani offices where “processes rely mainly on the use of people with every office full of a large number of clerks and a tremendous amount of files and paperwork” —automating it will only produce inefficiency at digital speed.
3. The Public Sector Implementation Challenge
Research specifically examining Pakistani public sector organizations reveals distinct challenges when initiating ERP projects. These include issues within organizational structure, functions, culture, human resources, and procedures. Government departments remain too dependent on individual skills to manage workload volume, creating systems that cannot respond quickly to citizens.
4. Financial and Technical Resource Constraints
Small and medium-sized enterprises in Pakistan face unique barriers compared to their counterparts in developed economies. Unlike SMEs in advanced economies that benefit from established IT infrastructure and government incentives, Pakistani SMEs lack the technical and financial resources required for ERP implementation.
Studies examining Pakistani companies, including Daraz.pk, Khaadi, Techlogix, PharmEvo, and TCS reveal that each encountered different types of barriers—financial, organizational, and technical—that represent common challenges across Pakistan’s SME sector.
5. The Multiple Windows Problem
A fascinating finding from Pakistan-specific ERP research: users find the opening of multiple windows simultaneously and get confused. Software manufacturers design interfaces for Western users, comfortable with complex navigation, but Pakistani end-users need different approaches. Additionally, error messages remain technical and incomprehensible to local users.
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