The comprehensive prototyping completed in 1999 provided a model for the rollout process. Based on that approach, the project team began the rollout process in 2000 and completed it in June of 2004. In preparation for this phase of the work, the project team created rollout groups for each of the ministries. The rollout groups applied a modified version of the prototype approach in which each user group in the ministries could be taught the system and the new processes.

As the rollout groups moved into the other ministries, their approach was supported by the fact that the best practice process for accounting and budgeting and the ERP system had been essentially given the stamp of approval by the Ministry of Social Security, Generations, and Consumer Protection. That prototype demonstrated to the other ministries that the new system could work. According to Christian Ihle, “We had to give them a system that the users felt supported the processes related to their responsibilities, showing that they could benefit in some way from using the system and processes that we had developed.” Throughout the rollout, the first prototype success was used as an example in the other ministries, and users from the prototype ministry were used to train users in the other ministries.

Accepting the new accounting and budgeting standards in the base system was a potential issue in all ministries. In some cases, processes were modified because the ministries had fixed rules, some of which were tied to legal mandates. However, based on the rollout team’s process modeling approach, users were usually able to see the efficiency potential in new processes. Examples from the prototype provided visual examples showing the time, money, and personnel resources that could be saved using the new process. According to Christian Ihle, “We trained roles; we didn’t train SAP experts. Therefore, it was a very action-focused training and system.”

Another aspect to the rollout was a series of “road shows” where a team from the Ministry of Finance went throughout the country to the capital towns and we invited all the opinion leaders from the federal organizations there and informed them about the project, the schedule and the milestones.” Based on the work during the prototyping, the project team had real results and experiences to share. The road show gave government employees and managers the opportunity to ask questions and express their concerns about how the new system would impact their jobs and became a big success for the project. According to Ihle, they had to make an effort to spread the good news because, “Bad news is able to destroy a project and good news doesn’t travel as fast as bad news. It was a very important task to inform the users and the opinion leaders at the right time before we implemented the system.”