With the results of the feasibility study in hand, Csoka and members of his team approached the Minister of Finance and the State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance to gain political support for moving forward with the project. According to Christian Ihle, “We knew we’d need the political support because of the substantial amount of funding it required and the long term impact it would have on all the federal ministries. Once we saw it was possible to achieve our goals with an ERP software package, we showed the State Secretary what we needed to do. He knew the value of information and therefore we didn’t really have a problem.”

In 1998, the project team, which consisted of the Ministry of Finance IT Directorate instructed by the Minister of Finance and the State Secretary, moved to secure support for the project at the ministerial level. Securing the political support of the 12 ministers enabled the Ministry of Finance team to gain access to the individual ministries and begin working with their bookkeeping units for an integrated system rollout.⁸ The project team was also able to rely on the Council of Ministers to help them settle the many disputes between the Ministry of Finance and the individual ministries that would arise throughout the project. In Christian Ihle’s terms, “We needed it to get our ‘back free.’ To go into all of the ministries, we needed this kind of support. It was important to feel free to work the ministries.”

Though the project had support at the Council of Ministers level, the individual ministries resisted paying for the project out of their own budgets. So the Ministry of Finance decided to finance the ERP implementation. With the financial arrangement in place, the project team could proceed to offer tenders, one for software and hardware, the other for project development support. The Ministry of Finance had no experience with such a large project at the beginning of the tender. According to Erich Albrechtowitz, application manager in the Ministry of Finance in charge of the ERP project budget, “This was a very challenging step for us. We didn’t have the power within the Ministry of Finance itself to implement the software on our own.” For the support tender, the project team sought a lead contractor with consulting and ERP experience. They chose Siemens Business Services for its expertise in both consulting and with SAP ERP implementation.