Systems Implementation
System Implementations
Describe the company, the business problem the company was addressing with the system implementation, the system chosen to implement, and the company's rationale for selecting the system to solve the problem.
Wal-Mart, a company that enjoys a significant market share in the U.S. food industry, rolled out its multi-phased project. This marked the beginning of implementing the company's long ditched in-house IT systems, which favored their operations with vendors. However, implementation of the SAP system is already raising red flags. This is because the system comes with costly financial works, which have strained the company (Scheck, 2010). While the project was aimed at leading the firm to growth, Wal-Mart recorded a significant sales decline. This was one of the company's worst performance over three decades now, been beaten by new corporations from Germany and South Korea. As local competitors maintained the pace set by Wal-Mart, most customers became culturally alienated from the company choosing to opt for rival products. In fact, as winter approached, most faithful Wal-Mart clients have spent much on gasoline and natural gas. These people do not intend to become enthusiastic shoppers that queue at Wal-Mart stores (Jacobs, 2012).
Wal-Mart has been ranked as one of the biggest and vats companies than some nations. However, it appears to experience a fickle perpetual success and growth in overseas markets. Instead of making further expansions, the firm should design ways of dealing with the prevailing economic realities. This involves focusing on alternative priorities. For instance, one alternative priority would be to deliver the failed RFID promise. With great anticipation, the company blindly introduced the SAP project. Perhaps they should have developed new capacities of IT to maintain the complex logistics, be consistent with supplier systems and meticulous clients. The implementation of SAT as Wal-Mart's corporate goal that lacks chances to succeed was an innovation projecting a failed project (Hellens, Nielsen, Beekhuyzen & Ebrary, 2008).
2. Evaluate the circumstance that leads to the failure indicating the factors that management failed to consider and how each impacted the failed implementation.
The management should be free to concentrate on strategic work founded on value addition and access better talents and workforce. Better talents lead to improved ways of delivering services; a way that would have put Wal-Mart at a competitive advantage. In the interest of implementing SAP systems, Wal-Mart did not have a vision of SAP solutions that fit into the strategic objectives of the company. Therefore, they were incapacitated to apply fast SAP solutions at minimal costs, based on lower risks. This failed to facilitate the success of the solution because the management did not conduct a test drive on the new system and processes (Ramachandran, 2007).
The management failed to embrace the implementation of SAP fully because they lacked awareness of the high costs associated with the project. This led to lower earning that expected, particularly in the negative and short-term returns on investment. The huge investments in SAP have drawn massive criticism leading to plunging stock prices. The failure of the project can be attributed to poor management, which failed to structure Wal-Mart to adopt the system effectively. Therefore, planning was essential for the management to implement the system successfully. The management should not have lost sight of the fact that the primary objective was to achieve improved business performance. Because they did not increase productivity and performance, the firm wasted resources on adopting SAP and transforming a system based on legacy (Hellens, Nielsen, Beekhuyzen & Ebrary, 2008).
The management failed to conduct effective re-implementation and pre-planning activities; Wal-Mart was not prepared and did not have effective plans to adopt SAP implementation adequately. It takes time to enforce organizational practices and culture. The legacy system that employees had developed familiarity with had become a legacy and adopting a new system proved to be challenging. For employees to adapt to SAP system, they must demonstrate the need for the new system. This means that the management is charged with ensuring employees understand why the SAP system…
