Assessment Activity

1. In your opinion, what decision option does IBM have in the case situation? • The main decision option on the case was to create a new business model that integrate all plants together and manage the same information. This will allow better management of the supply chain across all of its plants and quicker response in changes in the business environment.

2. What criteria are important to making this decision? • The first criteria that they need to consider on getting stated with the SAP was to define the cooperate standards for data, technical platforms and SAP implementation and tools. Also in what process areas would be implemented. • Second, they need it to create a team to implement PR2, they needed to consider the complexity due to the size of the plant and divided the implementation within multiple phases.

3. What implications and consequences does each of the options present? • The go live approach for the RTP production ramp down had some unresolved issues like; problems with the data DB2 data based, R/3 still being tested and end to end system testing was not completed. • The team had a very sort period of time to completed the implementation, under the time pressure exist the possibility of something going wrong, no meeting the deadlines and as a consequences a disruption of the project. • On of the implication was that in order for the PR2 to ramp up they had concentrated efforts and establish a ‘war room’ where the focus on any issues and meet constantly.

4. What data, facts or experiences can you use to support your suggested options and implications? • On cases where the company really needs to focus and concentrated efforts, they created war rooms. As an experience I can share that; currently the FDA is assessing the company where I work. The have created a war room to provide all the information that the FDA may need and also provided executive report at the end of the day. • As far as the software, every medium to high organization needs an integrated system. The need to standardized and centralized all the information and be capable of act to any changes as quick as possible. • Currently the company where are work are trying to created E-kanban system with the purpose to link and manages multiple data based.

5. List 5 of the most important concepts or knowledge that you gained from this case. • How important is collapse the development into a single environment. Having a common development environment ensures that a common configuration is maintain in each production environment. • The advantage of utilizing integrated system like SAP is that functionality including order entry, materials management, production planning, and distribution are coordinated. • SAP multilingual and multicurrency capability allows users in global companies, real time access to data anywhere in the world. • Benefits of SAP also include; faster customer response by moving products thought the supply chain quickly, retirement of aging application system, reduction in batch transfer and reconciliation between systems, single database with real time access and greater efficiency. • By standardizing and centralizing the information management is able to improve the information flow and control financial reporting. This highly centralizes operations. [pic]