Zafran Industries (pseudonmy) is a fast-growing Nigerian manufacturing group supplying packaged food ingredients to domestic and regional markets. Over the past five years, headquarters has pursued an aggressive integration strategy, consolidating procurement, inventory control, and financial reporting across its plants in Lagos, Ogun State, and Kaduna. Fragmented data and limited visibility into plant-level performance had become a recurring board-level concern. In response, the group approved the rollout of a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across all plants, promising real-time inventory tracking, tighter procurement controls, and standardised financial reporting. For headquarters, the ERP was positioned not merely as an efficiency tool but as an instrument of managerial discipline, intended to eliminate informal workarounds and establish a single version of the truth. At the Ogun State plant, implementation unfolded under markedly different conditions. Frequent electricity outages and unstable internet disrupted system access several times each day. To keep production running, supervisors reverted to paper logs during outages, later reconciling these with the ERP when connectivity returned. Discrepancies emerged between physical output, manual records, and data visible to headquarters. What plant supervisors understood as pragmatic problem-solving was increasingly interpreted as non-compliance. Caught in the middle was Adekunle Balogun, the plant manager. Kunle’s dilemma was not whether to implement the ERP, but how to lead when a system designed for stability collided with operational reality.
Nwagboso et al. (Tue,) studied this question.