You are the CIO of a manufacturing firm. The CEO and CFO continue to express con

Question

You are the CIO of a manufacturing firm. The CEO and CFO continue to express concern over the lack of integration among business processes within their functional business areas. They feel an ERP system coupled with Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship functionality is the answer.

Both executives have heard negative reports from fellow executives in other companies and from press reports of failed ERP implementations. To avoid duplicating the same situation in their organization, the CEO and CFO request that you submit a Proposed Approach for Implementing an ERP system report. Ultimately, these organizational leaders want to determine if their company is ready for ERP.

Your initial deliverable is a draft document that should include the following content:

A proposed approach for conducting a needs assessment/requirements gathering initiative. The requirements should reflect the functional business processes your firm needs to implement.

Explanation / Answer

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ERP is an important resource for any company at a certain level of function where there is a scope of integration of all the processes and the different software that is used to create this data.

To assess if a company is ready for an ERP it needs to be taken into account, the different processes and their dependencies and all the data that is generated from these processes. Wherever there is no platform to integrate all the different processes, there is no fundamental integration of the software that is used for these processes, an ERP system should be implemented.

Unlike in the past where the ERP system was only accessible to the bigger firms, with the advent of cloud computing, smaller firms can utilize the correct ERP system based on their company’s size and requirements and implement the best ERP system catering to their specifications.

If there is a manual process of accounting, the time spent on creating a physical medium for the record of a company’s processes can be saved exponentially and this needs to be assessed before ERP can be implemented. If the customer interaction and service model is suffering then there is also the need for another model or an ERP implementation.

To check if the ERP system is necessary for realizing the future goals of the company, an analysis of the current technology must be undertaken. In order to justify the cost of implementing an ERP system, a cost-benefit analysis needs to be conducted which helps determine the impact of implementing the solution into the current framework.

The approach should be the gathering the data from the various separate processes and their departments into a list which then allows us to determine the level of interaction between the separate processes, the collected data and check for accounting and inconsistencies in maintaining a physical copy of the data and then according to the assessment, referencing a list of different ERP solutions for the company.

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