Case Study: Integrating Erp Systems in a Decentralized Company

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Case Study: Integrating ERP Systems in a Decentralized Company Much more in-depth planning should have been undertaken before launching the ERP project. Medical Device Corporation (MDC) should have formed a committee composed of one to two representatives from its various divisions who have expertise on business and IT strategy. This committee would have been able to identify situations the company needed to address in the event of problems transitioning to the new enterprise resource planning system. Had MDC organized the committee, it would have sent the message to the businesses that each division’s input was valued. In the past, each division made individual decisions for their respective business unit. However, headquarters made the decision to implement Oracle as its ERP. Additionally, most of the managers had no experience in IT or employing ERP systems. The company did not take its global markets into consideration and how the new system would affect it. MDC is one of the largest companies in the medical device industry with majority of its revenues coming from overseas markets. Many of MDC units were using nonintegrated systems that were not modernized. The company did not take into consideration how the system upgrade could affect how the overseas systems would communicate with headquarters and other regional sites. The group should have come up with better timelines on how to phase the new system for each division. Since MDC took a hands-off approach to technology and information systems for each division that made it difficult to determine which technology would work for all sites to integrate as one. Oracle became the platform for all divisions to use and only two out of were able to go live with the software. Better planning would have allowed MDC to debug the program before going live. When considering a plan, it should consist of assessing
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