Keda, a manufacturer of large-scale machinery in China, had successfully deployed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that was paying for itself through more efficient inventory management. This was significant because despite China’s increasing demand for ERP systems, an estimated 80 per cent of ERP implementation efforts failed in the country. The vice general manager of Keda had a large backlog of other information technology projects, and he wanted to carefully evaluate the ERP project to determine what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and what Keda had achieved through simple luck.