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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.

What also accelerated adoption was the level of trust across the entire social fabric of the company; many of those using the systems had been working together for decades. One of the greatest inhibitors of new enterprise system development and implementation is the lack of trust that often exists across departments and divisions of a business (Aladwani, 2001). This is especially the case where data is financial and production-centric in nature, concentrating on the areas of profitability as well, as bonuses and compensation are often tied to these metrics (Francoise, Bourgault, Pellerin, 2009). For Cardinal Health, the tightness of their social networks internally, the social fabric of the company was so strong that people trusted and relied on each other well before the ERP R/3 instance was implemented. The BI tools and analytics applications were seen as valuable and useful as the system architects had taken the time