Challenges Japanese Companies in Thailand Face When Selecting an ERP System (1)

Date : 13-02-2026

Challenges Japanese Companies in Thailand Face When Selecting an ERP System
ERP as the First Step in a Company’s Digital Transformation Strategy

In recent years, regardless of industry or business type, advancing DX initiatives and leveraging AI in operations—so called “digital transformation strategies”—have become urgent priorities for many companies. These are no longer mere internal productivity or efficiency improvement activities, but indicators that stakeholders outside the company increasingly expect as part of evaluating corporate value.

ERP systems play a vital role as the foundational information platform that enables DX and AI adoption. However, even after implementing an ERP system, if business processes and systems are not sufficiently integrated and standardized, companies will face significant limitations when trying to utilize digital information. This not only undermines ROI but may also require substantial additional system investment in the future.

At the same time, many Japanese companies operating in Thailand rarely have Japanese IT professionals who can properly design a digital transformation roadmap centered around ERP. In many cases, the local IT staff only handle PC and network maintenance, while the IT division at the Japan headquarters—often citing workload constraints—cannot provide adequate support for overseas subsidiaries. This is the reality for many companies.

Our company has supported ERP implementations for more than 40 businesses in Thailand (as of February 2026). Through our involvement in system proposals and consultation, we have also heard numerous challenges from many others. In this column, based on our accumulated experience, we would like to explore the difficulties Japanese companies face when evaluating and selecting ERP solutions—and the root causes behind them.

Knowing That the Current Situation Is Problematic - But Not Knowing Where to Start

For many Japanese managers newly assigned to an overseas subsidiary, the first issue they notice is often the unreliability of reported data. Basic management indicators—such as sales forecasts, actual revenue and gross margin, inventory turnover, or production plan vs. actual and cost variances—may be unavailable, slow to generate, or inaccurate.

It is immediately clear that part (or much) of the problem lies in the lack of an integrated business system platform. Data is often manually maintained or consolidated from multiple systems. However, understanding why this situation has developed is extremely difficult. Reasons often heard include:

• “It has been done this way since I joined, and although inconvenient, I assumed this is how it must be.”
• “I proposed improvements to the previous Japanese manager, but they were rejected without clear explanation.”
• “The system vendor told us this function cannot be achieved with our current ERP.”
• “Our operations are unique and complex, so it is better to use Excel for this process.”
• “The production team says data entry takes too much time, so they use handwritten forms instead.”

When asking for explanations, various surface-level reasons emerge, and due to language barriers or inconsistent explanations across departments, the true cause becomes unclear.

Ideally, the IT department should lead the effort to identify issues, analyze root causes, and propose improvements. However, even IT teams with application development experience often focus primarily on building applications tailored to individual department requests. As a result, expecting them to coordinate cross-functional viewpoints and consolidate requirements is quite challenging.

As a result, Japanese managers we meet commonly share the following concerns:

• “Each department has listed many system improvement requests, but I cannot determine which ones are truly important or worth investing in.”
• “Requested improvements seem to optimize only individual departmental workflows. I cannot see the overall company-wide benefits or whether they contribute to corporate value or competitiveness.”
• “Our discussions center only on comparing ERP features, but we haven’t defined what our company must achieve through the system.”

In this environment, how can companies organize ERP requirements that ensure operational viability for all departments, and obtain accurate proposals from ERP vendors?

In the next column, we will explore this topic in further detail.