The world of ERP may seem boring to those caught up in the hysteria over Twitter and iPhone applications, but there’s plenty of drama to be found: Troubled multimillion-dollar software deals that produce spectacular failures and huge spending nightmares; vendor marketing bravado that breeds cut-throat competition and contempt; and embarrassing and costly lawsuits over botched implementations and intellectual property breaches. Consider CIO.com’s brief and semichronological history of five ERP scandals as a warning if you’re contemplating an upgrade or implementation. 1. Definitely Not a Sweet Experience for Hershey: Could a failed technology implementation take down a Fortune 500 company (in this case Hershey Foods)? Well, it certainly didn’t help Hershey’s operations during the Halloween season in 1999 or make Wall Street investors thrilled. In the end, Hershey’s ghastly problems with its SAP ERP, Siebel CRM and Manugistics supply chain applications prevented it from delivering $100 million worth of Kisses for Halloween that year and caused the stock to dip 8 percent. So I guess a failed technology project can’t actually take down a Fortune 500 company for good, but it can certainly knock it around a bit. 2. Just Do It: Fix Our Supply Chain System: What did a $400 million upgrade to Nike’s supply chain and ERP systems get the world-renowned shoe- and athletic gear-maker? Well, for starters, $100 million in lost sales, a 20 percent stock dip and a collection of class-action lawsuits. This was all back in 2000, and the horrendous results were due to a bold ERP, supply chain and CRM project that aimed to upgrade the systems into one superstar system. Nike’s tale is both of woe and warning. 3. HP’s “Perfect Storm” of ERP Problems: The epic tale of HP’s centralization of its disparate North American ERP systems onto one SAP system proves that one can never be too pessimistic when it comes to ERP project management. You see, in 2004, HP’s project managers knew all of the things that could go wrong with their ERP rollout. But they just didn’t plan for so many of them to happen at once. The project eventually cost HP $160 million in order backlogs and lost revenue— more than five times the project’s estimated cost. Said Gilles Bouchard, then-CIO of HP’s global operations: “We had a series of small problems, none of which individually would have been too much to handle. But together they created the perfect storm.” 4. A New Type of Freshman Hazing: Pity the college freshman at the University of Massachusetts in fall 2004: The last thing they needed was some computer program to haunt their lives and make their new collegiate experience even more uncertain. But more than 27,000 students at the University of Massachusetts as well as Stanford and Indiana Universities were forced to do battle with buggy portals and ERP applications that left them at best unable to find their classes and at worst unable to collect their financial aid checks. Said one UMass senior at the time: “The freshmen were going crazy because they didn’t know where to go.” After a couple of tense days and weeks, however, everyone eventually got their checks and class schedules. 5. Waste Management Trashes Its “Fake” ERP Software: Garbage-disposal giant Waste Management is still embroiled in an acrimonious $100 million legal battle with SAP over an 18-month installation of its ERP software. The initial deal began in 2005, but the legal saga commenced in March 2008, when Waste Management filed suit and claimed SAP executives participated in a fraudulent sales scheme that resulted in the massive failure. Several months later, SAP fired back, claiming that Waste Management allegedly violated its contractual agreement with SAP in several ways, including by “failing to timely and accurately define its business requirements,” and not providing “sufficient, knowledgeable, decision-empowered users and managers” to work on the project. In the fall 2008, accusations were still flying about documentation, depositions and delays in bringing the case before a judge. And that proposed 18-month implementation now sounds like a dream scenario. Required: 1. Why do you think it is so difficult to find successful ERP implementation? 2. How do you think cloud computing will help ERP implementations find success? 3. What advice would you give a company deciding to implement an ERP system? 4. How can integrating SCM, CRM, and ERP help improve business operations at your school?
> How did ebusiness change traditional business models?
> What is an ebusiness model?
> What is the difference between search engine ranking and search engine optimization?
> Why is search engine ranking important to a company?
> What are the four data-mining techniques for predictions and why are they important to a business?
> What is data-driven decision management?
> What are the four data-mining techniques? Provide examples of how you would use each one in business.
> Identify the advantages of using business intelligence to support managerial decision making.
> What are the six steps in the data-mining process and why is each important?
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> What is distributed computing and how has it helped drive the big data era?
> Slack’s business model is simple: Be Less Busy. It’s hard to imagine any busy professional not coveting those simple words. Slack’s promise is to make business professionals more productive by eliminating meetings and emails. Can you imagine a life witho
> Bitcoin is a new currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin isn’t just a currency, like dollars or euros or yen. It’s a way of making payments, like PayPal or the Visa credit card network. Bitcoins ca
> Identify the four common characteristics of big data.
> Identify the four challenges associated with ebusiness.
> Describe the six ebusiness tools for connecting and communicating.
> Compare the four categories of ebusiness models.
> Explain the importance of data analytics and data visualization.
> Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization.
> Explain data mining and identify the three elements of data mining.
> Data Visualization: Stories for the Information Age At the intersection of art and algorithm, data visualization schematically abstracts information to bring about a deeper understanding of the data, wrapping it in an element of awe. While the practice
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> Micheal Porter is a university professor at Harvard Business School, where he leads the Institute on Strategy and Competitiveness, studying competitiveness for companies and nations—and as a solution to social problems. He is the founder of numerous nonp
> Where are the supplier’s suppliers in a typical supply chain?
> Where are the customer’s customers in a typical supply chain?
> What is the bullwhip effect and how can it impact a supply chain and a firm’s profitability?
> What are the five primary activities in a supply chain?
> What are the three different ERP implementation choices?
> Describe Web 1.0 along with ebusiness and its associated advantages.
> How does a company measure the success of an ERP system?
> At the heart of an ERP system is a database that is capturing all of the operational system data.
> The four most common extended ERP components business intelligence, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and ebusiness.
> What are the components in a core ERP system?
> What is the difference between core and extended ERP?
> What is an enterprise resource planning system?
> What is RFID’s primary purpose in the supply chain?
> What is materials management and how does it impact the supply chain?
> What is logistics and how does it impact the supply chain?
> What is procurement and how does it impact the supply chain?
> Did you know: â– Once every 3 minutes, the average company comes into contact with viruses and malware. â– One in every 291 email messages contains a virus. â– Three things hackers want most are customer
> Have you ever seen the movie Terminator in which machines take over the world? Do you think that scenario could ever come true? Researching the Internet of Things makes you wonder if robots can gain self-consciousness, making the possibility of them taki
> Describe supply chain management along with its impact on business.
> Identify the core and extended areas of enterprise resource planning.
> Describe the role information plays in enterprise resource planning systems.
> Discuss the current technologies organizations are integrating in enterprise resource planning systems.
> Identify the three components of supply chain management along with the technologies reinventing the supply chain.
> Have you ever lost a beloved pet? No worries, just draw a picture of your pet and print a plastic replica from your 3D desktop printer so your cat or dog can sit on your desk forever. Can you imagine printing your drawing in 3D? Well, there is no need to
> We are currently in the middle of the connected car revolution, a vehicle equipped with smart sensors, Internet access, and a number of information systems that make driving easy, intelligent, and safe. Connected cars share information with individuals i
> In his book The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world and “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore, and Bethesda next-door neighbors.&a
> Over 20 years ago a few professors at MIT began describing the Internet of Things (IoT), which is a world where interconnected Internet-enabled devices or “things” have the ability to collect and share data without human intervention. Another term for th
> What is the relationship between adware and spyware?
> What are the costs associated with downtime?
> What are the reasons a company experiences downtime?
> What is the difference between pirated software and counterfeit software?
> What is the correlation between privacy and confidentiality?
> What are ethics and why are they important to a company?
> What is business intelligence and how can it help a company achieve success?
> What are the causes of dirty data?
> What is the purpose of information cleansing (or scrubbing)?
> How does ETL help transfer data in and out of the data warehouse?
> Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a question answering machine. The supercomputer is named for IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson. The Watson supercompu
> What is a data warehouse and why would a business want to implement one?
> What is the difference between a knowledge facilitator and knowledge assets?
> What is the relationship between hackers and viruses?
> What are the positive and negative effects associated with monitoring employees?
> What are the three types of analytics?
> How can a company use disintermediation to achieve a competitive advantage?
> How does system thinking support business operations?
> What type of career are you planning to pursue? How will your specific career use data, information, business intelligence, and knowledge?
> Do you agree that MIS is essential for businesses operating in the information age? Why or why not?
> What is MIS and what role does it plays in an organization?
> Why is it important for a company to operate cross-functionally?
> What is the relationship between data, information, business intelligence, and knowledge?
> How can a manager turn data into information?
> What is data? Why is data important to a business?
> Why are customer relationships important to an organization? Do you agree that every business needs to focus on customers to survive in the information age?
> What is a supply chain inventory visibility system?
> How can a business use clickstream data to help improve website efficiency?
> What are the five primary activities in a supply chain?
> What is supply chain management and why is it important to a company?
> Explain how finding different ways to travel the same road relates to automation, streamlining, and business process reengineering.
> Explain the difference between customer-facing processes and business-facing processes. Which one is more important to an organization?
> Why would a manager need to review an As-Is and To-Be process model?
> Why do managers need to understand business processes? Can you make a correlation between systems thinking and business processes?
> What is an enterprise resource planning system?
> What is a business process and what role does it play in an organization?
> How can a company use Porter’s value chain analysis to measure customer satisfaction?
> What are Porter’s three generic strategies and why would a company want to follow only one?
> What are the four ebusiness advantages?
> How could a company use switching costs to lock in customers and suppliers?
> How could a company use loyalty programs to influence buyer power?
> What is the role Porter’s Five Forces Model plays in decision making?
> When would you use a SWOT analysis to help you make business decisions?
> Who are the top three most important stakeholders in a business?
> What is the relationship between a business strategy and stakeholders?
> What are the capabilities associated with digital dashboards?
> Define expert systems and describe the role they play in a business.
> Define decision support systems and describe the role they play in a business.
> Define transaction processing systems and describe the role they play in a business.
