Founded in 1997, AREP is a subsidiary of the French national rail operator SNCF. This multidisciplinary construction and urban-planning consultancy employs nearly 900 members of staff and combines skills in architecture, engineering, urban planning and design. Damien Saillant, Tools and Methods Manager from the company’s Finance Department, looks back at the support his company received when it rolled out a new ERP solution.

IT really came of age between the 1980s and the 2000s. Companies invested in uniform, standardised and often inflexible management software backed by vendor-integrator giants. Today, however, needs have changed. Everything is new: regulations, billing methods, types of customer relations and customer demands. From now on, your ERP software must support these ongoing developments. And that means that it must be agile.

The change of ERP system in a company is a project that needs to be carried out according to a rigorous schedule. However, your carefully laid plans can be upset by two main factors:

• Extension of the different stages by the client,
• An increase in the number of days required by the publisher integrating the new software.