As GST may be introduced at a short notice owing to political compulsions, the time available for businesses to analyse the impact of GST and make changes across business functions will remain a significant challenge. An effective and seamless transition to the new GST regime mandates that organisations adopt a 'business transformation' approach, rather than merely consider it a 'tax change' project. It would involve multiple stakeholders in an organization including the tax, finance, IT, supply chain, procurement and sales and marketing departments.

Past experiences suggest that though several organisations with complex operations/wide-geographical spread could take 8 to 12 months for a successful transition to the new regime, it is expected that they are likely to get a shorter window to prepare for the transition. Hence, businesses need to accord high priority on the transition in order to realise the full-scale benefits of GST.