Braebill Case Study the Braebill

Braebill Case Study

The Braebill Company has been in business for over 80 years, and though a series of acquisitions in 1982, now has five companies under its umbrella. Most focus on seasonal manufacturing (engines, generators, alternative power, etc.) and is organized around a value-stream proposition. Because of the nature of their business, they realized the need to adopt a "lean manufacturing" process to be able to remain competitive when faced with global competitive pressures -- less expensive imports, stakeholder demands for higher quality at a lower price, and concerns about the environment and sustainability (Eierman and Iverson 2009). Of course, these pressures are not unique to Braebill, but are being faced by a number of American organizations that have trouble keeping up with inexpensive manufacturing costs in Asia and other parts of the world; coupled with fewer regulatory agencies, often extra government subsidies, and more lax environmental protection laws. Many scholars, in fact, see that technological innovation and learning, while complex, are some of the ways that companies can both remain competitive and lead their market niche in innovation (Dodgson 1991).

Braebill faced some challenges, though, and adopted a lean management style known as Kaizen throughout the organization. However, despite the nature of the process, which is designed to look at systems, deconstruct them and then reconstruct in a more powerful and efficient manner, the IT Department at Braebill became a bottleneck. It was not that the personnel did not wish to contribute; it was that the systems were out of date. Faced with this, an Enterprise Resource Management system (ERP) made logical implementation sense. However, for any ERP to work, it had to be flexible. ERP systems, though, are complex, and implementing can be difficult, time-consuming, and very expensive. Braebill assumed it would be a fairly easy transition. However, employees of large Reno organizations have had firsthand experience with ERP and counseled the Braebill executives that it might take years for the system to be complete, implemented, and working within the demands of the Kaizen structure (Mabert 2001).

In addition, for a company like Braebill, the only way an ERP would work profitably is to roll it out corporate-wide, ensuring that each division (actually each sub-company), integrate the processes in a similar manner. Tensions also arose because of different stakeholder expectations from these different companies; Braebill in general had other priorities and needed capital, but Westlin (sub-company) was far into the process of already selecting an ERP system. Braebill's "Vision of Convergence" does seem to be sincere, as proven by the hiring of Jim Farrel as IT directory with a staff to begin the process, as well as upper management support on using IT as a focus for driving the direction of the company's need to standardize.

Certainly, there are other solutions than a huge overhaul of the entire organization's IT in this process. One concept might be to put the ERP system in place in Westin as quickly as possible, work out the bugs, develop a training process, and then one-by-one invite members of the other companies to train at Westin prior to implementation. The advantage to this would be a lower risk (both fiscally and organizationally); the disadvantage would be slowing down the integration process in the other business groups. Research does show, however, that rather than basic, software-specific training, a more broad-based understanding of the integration of systems and the flow of information is needed in order for ERP to be successful. Additionally, planning for future issues is akin to managing risk, and might serve Braebill better to have a chance to beta-test a system prior to full implementation (Buchanan and Connor 2001). This could be accomplished by forming an organizational wide ERP Implementation Team, with members from each company participating in the work already completed by Westin. Since so much of the work is already completed, there is a jump on both time and costs. By using individuals from the other groups, there is a chance of greater training opportunities, buy-in, and appropriate configuration on a roll out, which then could be planned for a more cost effective quarterly basis rather than all at once.