Standardizing enterprise resource planning systems across Riordan Manufacturing locations

Riordam

Implementation at Riordan

Adopting new and more efficient technologies is vital in any modern organization. Riordan Manufacturing Company is a multi-billion dollar plastics manufacturer, which makes good use of top-of-the-line technological equipment for its home base in San Juan. However, the multi-billion dollar company has yet to implement a solid technological foundation for its various other locations. Each location has finance and accounting departments; however, communication is minimal between the locations because of a lack of proper software installments and requirements. It takes a significant amount of time to reconcile the data between these various systems and the company could be much more efficient in regards to administration if they work towards standardization.

Current System

The current system represents a plethora of different systems that were the result of several acquisitions. After the company acquired other divisions, the staff continued using the existing legacy system. They would compile there various metrics in a way that would eventually have to be reentered into the parent company's system. Many mistakes have occurred by the unnecessary steps as well as significant delays. Management generally does not have the latest up-to-date information in which to base their decisions.

Project Boundaries

The projects should be implemented one by one at each of the different locations with a dedicated team to handle the design and implementation. This will ensure the utmost quality as the team does not have to relearn many of the implementation steps and can use their own internal best practices. With that in mind, the team should begin with the most suited location and begin the project planning. Furthermore they must stay until the entire staff at the location is trained on the new system.

Project Restraints

The restraints in this project will be that the team will have to do a phased roll out as opposed to a big bang approach. This will help keep costs down by building an internal team for the project but it will also slow the entire process. However, it will also ensure quality and end user acceptance because the team can build skills and specialize in training.

Business Functional Requirements

The business functional requirements consist of updating each of the satellite locations with compatible software as the parent company. This will be composed of adding several modules of the current ERP system including finance, human resources, and materials planning. This will allow the company to be more responsive to their own internal trends.

New System

The new system will be an integrated ERP system that includes all of the various locations. This system will allow management to access up-to-date information for the entire company. There will be several modules include in the new system that are all integrated with themselves as well as the central servers for instantaneous data processing of multiple items.

Design Requirements

The interface that the new system will possess will be totally different than the previous system and the end user will require a significant amount of training. Not only that but since the systems are all different and fragment there will likely be a large amount of business process redesign that will have to adapt the older systems to the parent company's requirements.

Cost -- benefit Analysis

The costs of the system will be enormous up front. However, the payback period is likely to be in the five-year range due to efficiencies in transaction costs that are generated by the new company. Furthermore, there will be a plethora of intangible that will also be produced through faster information sharing as well as data mining and internal/external trend spotting and response.