Analysis
Essays

KRISTEN'S COOKIE COMPANY will be a small business conducted from the campus flat and run by two roommates. Its aim will be to sell fresh and delicious cookies to students. Two particular features are worth mentioning as…

The past few decades have been characterized by various changes on multiple organizational levels. And a most relevant such change is the development of a strong corporate culture that integrates all shareholders and…

Chiquita is a leading brand in the international market, but their existence has not been without turmoil. The latest is the one caused by their confession to having financed terrorist organizations in Columbia in…

Too Big to Fail?: An Analysis of the Current Economic Downturn and the Federal Government's Response

Sales Management and Reporting at Chemgrow

The work of Vecer, Kreidl, and Smid (2005) entitled: "Condition Indicators for Gearbox Conditioning Monitoring Systems" states that condition monitoring systems are very important for researchers in gearbox development.

Behn, R. (1995). The Big Questions of Public Management. Public Administration Review, 55 (4), 313.

¶ … healthcare information technology project failures and best practices recovery. It highlights factors that are responsible for such failures including lack of direction, clarity of goals, consistent system and…

Alcan's growth as a global conglomerate in the aluminum and metal fabrication industry follows a similar trajectory of many companies whose business models forced rapid, highly distributed business models at the expense Information Technologies (IT) management systems consistency and performance. Alcan's IT management systems and underlying infrastructure have become balkanized as the company has grown into four separately functioning and highly autonomous business units. In evaluating the key success factors of successful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations in multisite locations, the most critical factor overall is creating a unified, well synchronized system of record across all ERP instances (Hanafizadeh, Gholami, Dadbin, Standage, 2010). A second key success factor for multisite ERP implementations is the ability to negotiate a very low level of maintenance pricing with ERP vendors in the form of multisite or use-based pricing instead of the traditional per-seat model (Law, Chen, Wu, 2010). A third key success factor in the implementing multisite ERP systems is the ability to create a shared set of analytics, financial reporting metrics and measured of shared collaboration performance across all sites (Nour, Mouakket, 2011). Alcan has none of these best practices in effect during the time periods of the case study. They are conversely creating very high costs of maintenance for themselves, paying $500M in software costs and fees to SAP, tolerating up to 400 systems dedicated to just pricing alone, and attempting to manage well over 1,000 systems throughout the four divisions. As the company continues to grow and attempts to move into new markets where unifying all four divisions is necessary, they will find their IT systems are more of a liability than an asset in their current configuration. Coupled with the escalating costs of keeping each of the four divisions under maintenance with SAP, the ongoing high costs of integration, there is the threat of compliance violations to industry safety and quality requirements in addition to Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) financial reporting requirements. All of these factors taken together point to the need for more effective IT management strategy that takes into account the critical success factors for ERP system integration in a highly decentralized organizational structure. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the pros and cons of the current Alcan IT management system, in addition to evaluating the pros and cons of the new Alcan IT enterprise architecture as proposed by Robert Ouelette. The final section of the paper discusses if moving from the current Alcan IT management system to a new structure is advisable or not.

Alcohol abuse would be approached by an economist in terms of demand and supply. Where there exists a demand for intoxication and for consuming alcoholic drinks, there will be suppliers available, willing to fill in this demand gap and cashing in on the profits that they can reap. One possible solution is that people are made to see the disadvantages of drinking, against the advantages- which are none, so that, acting as rational decision-makers, they can decide on their own, on stopping drinking. In a similar vein, in order to curb consumption, people and especially youth can be made to realize from the beginning that drinking is ‘un-cool', leading to a change in trend that can help with curbing demand. The second solution that can be used in this case, using the factor that alcohol use can create secondary effects, is that everything has a cost. Therefore the prices on alcoholic drinks can be raised through imposing high taxes on them, staving off demand, especially from youngsters, who will not be able to afford it due to their limited income. The four elements that have been used here, as can be seen from the above analysis are that everything has a cost, economic actions create secondary actions, incentives matter (in case of suppliers looking for profits to supply alcoholic drinks) and that people choose for good reasons so that if these reasons are changed, their lifestyle patterns and choices too might change.