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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.

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