Functional Consultants' Role in Enterprise Systems Implementations

Although Enterprise Systems (ES) implementations (and formerly Enterprise Resource Planning systems) literature is extremely wide, most of it takes the perspective of the implementing organization and its employees: project managers, key-users and users. The fact that one of the possible ways of conducting such a complicated, time and money consuming project is to use functional consultants is largely omitted and therefore the role of these consultants in the ES implementation projects is not yet well discovered. This paper explores the role of functional consultants by analysing the detailed lists of activities, performed by them in five projects, led by five different consulting enterprises. The analysis of project documentation, followed by coding resulted in a consistent task list in each of the project phases as well as its assignment to one of the project participants: consultants or implementing company. Generalization of this list allowed for the formulation of the conclusions on the consultants' role in the analysed projects.