Cardinal Health company overview and operations

Cardinal Health Case Analysis

The majority of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects fail despite many of them extending for years in many cases and still not delivering results they were designed for. Contrary to this majority of ERP failures, the case study of Cardinal Health illustrates how successful a combined ERP and Business Intelligence (BI) can be when insightful, intelligent planning is first completed. The project teams at Cardinal Health concentrated their efforts on ensuring data structures and information cultures across the company were tightly integrated with each other. Making this a priority and a pervading mindset of the project also solved one of the most challenging aspects of any large-scale IT or ERP project, and this is getting change management to work successfully (Sharratt, McMurdo, 1993). By ensuring a tight integration of the data structures to the information culture, the SAP R/3 system and BI platforms implemented were immediately responsive to the information needs of the entire company. By unifying these two factors the system architects were able to infuse the ERP system and BI components into the culture of the company quickly, engraining it into workflows over time by making the system a new, trusted resource for analytics, data and reporting.

Analysis of the Cardinal Health Case

The implementation of any ERP system can take months to years of effort within an enterprise and often will only deliver a portion of the total information expected. With millions spent many enterprises fail to gain the insights and intelligence they need to make full use of all the features in an ERP systems as well. Add in the complexity of BI, analytics and reporting tools, and the potential for confusion and the proliferation of reports, some of interest yet marginally valuable to a business, can easily happen. The paradox for Cardinal Health was the need to reign in the intellectual curiosity that BI and analytics applications can generate while staying focused just on the most critical aspects of automating and adding insight into their core businesses. The goals Cardinal Health defined prior to the implementation were to consolidate 20 different enterprise systems, improve user interfaces of their enterprise systems and resolve 2K issues. The three success factors of the implementation centered on the use of a common data model, limiting the variety of end user tools to keep the overall scope of analysis within the boundaries of strategic goals, and most important, the development and continual investment in a robust support environment. All these of factors combined to drive up the level of adoption and utilization of the BI and analytics systems.