The Automobile and Aircraft Industries - Assignment Example

Globalization Q1 (All information for individual companies have been sourced from information published on their respective corporate sites) Continental AG1 Continental AG is an international corporation based in Hanover, Germany with expertise in manufacturing parts for the automobile and aircraft industries. Although the company has several major automobile manufacturers including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota as some of its major global customers, the company manufactures most of its products within its factories in Germany. The company has sales offices in over 30 different countries, which serve as outposts catering to orders from local customers. The Headquarters based in Hanover is the sole governing authority for the group and makes all strategic and managerial decisions for its offices worldwide. Unilever2 Unilever is an Anglo-Dutch company based out of Rotterdam, Netherlands and is also listed as having another headquarters in London. The company owns many of the world’s famous consumer brands in food, beverages, home and personal care. Given its dual listed nature, the company is governed by directors based out of both head offices and in effect operates in a highly decentralized fashion. The primary reason behind operating as a dual listed entity has been to concentrate on local markets and ensure that the best resources are utilized in each core market where Unilever conducts primary business operations. In fact, the company used to promote different brands for common products such as its ‘Heartbrand’ range of ice creams, which signifies the high level of independence enjoyed by each subsidiary within the local market. Philips3 A Dutch multinational corporation, Philips is one of the largest electronics corporations with operations in over 60 countries. A primary requirement of a company that provides electronic products to several markets is local customization of the product portfolio in addition to development of innovative products. This requires highly talented engineers to relocate to target markets and focus their contributions towards developing highly customized products. In this context, the company registers itself as a separate legal entity in every market it operates and conducts business as a separate company. Philips is governed by an executive body based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Toyota4 Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, can be considered as a global corporation that operates in a centralized and globally scalable organizational structure, although it largely operates in each specific country in a highly decentralized manner. The extent of the influence of the dependence on the parent company (based in Japan) can be witnessed in the case of the world famous Toyota production system or the Kaizen waste reduction mechanism, which was conceived by the company’s Japanese bosses, but has become a standard practice across the company’s assembly lines across the world. Panasonic5 Panasonic is another famous Japanese corporation that has a strong presence in the global electronics market. However, its organizational structure can be considered transnational given the dispersed and highly interdependent operations. For instance, the company designs its phones in Japan. While the models intended for the Asian and American markets are produced in Japan, the models sold in Europe are manufactured in Europe to utilize the locally available resources and reduce costs of transportation. Further, the company has regional headquarters such as the one in New Jersey, which oversees its operations in North America. The individual contributions of national units to worldwide operations signify the transnational structure of the Panasonic Corporation. Siemens6 Siemens AG, based primarily out of 3 major cities in Germany, is another example of a transnational corporation and operates across 15 business divisions. The company employs over 400,000 employees and operates in over 190 countries as a conglomerate of individual subsidiaries. The company has opened specialized business units in individual countries although much of their operations continue to be highly interdependent and managed by several individual business units simultaneously. Based on its highly international presence, the company’s activities require both engineers and managers to relocate depending on the requirements and business prospects of individual projects, which is ultimately determined by the target country or market. Q2 Global ERP The purpose of implementing a global ERP system is to facilitate the smooth operation of various functions associated with an international organization. The primary emphasis of the global ERP system will be to work towards a proper standardization of all business processes within the organization, which will help provide a better insight into operations on a global scale. The SLAs will be structures with a focus on reduction of additional costs due to maintenance of related IT systems and to ensure proper compliance with all legal regulations both at local, regional and international levels (Effy Oz, 2008). The purpose of implementing a standard ERP system across international offices with local language support is also to facilitate an effective consolidation of all financial reporting activities and to provide an automated consensus on the performance of individual business units and the corporation as a whole. This will ensure a faster closure of books and bring in the much needed centralized management for the top officials in the organization including the CEO and CIO. It is also important to consider such an ERP implementation to increase the efficiency of the organization’s supply chain and to facilitate a real time view of individual business units for the management. Q3 There are primarily three layers of architecture within ERP systems that can be configured on the basis of industry and www standards, which are vendor neutral. The presentation layer defines the best practices to include in showing the appropriate data to the appropriate users and is also crucial to achieve the much needed interoperability between the ERP systems and third party applications such as MS Word and Excel (Witold, 2008). The application layer serves the purpose of encapsulating data into logical objects and handles the task of processing user and system requests and works on the database layer with the ERP hierarchy. Standards in this context are devised on the basis of the breadth of the interaction between the application layer and the client interfaces that ensure interoperability. Vendor neutral standards have been produced by w3c.org, uddi.org and oasis.org for ERP systems and vendors and should be duly followed when selecting software or developing ERP systems (Gerald Grant, 2003). Modern ERP systems depend on a high degree of interoperability amongst individual modules and much of this communications happens through the use of web services. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as the formal specification language for business processes and interaction, which helps in interoperable integration and allows for the automation of common and repetitive business processes, this increasing the efficiency and response of business units (Chetan Sankar, 2006). In the case of the application layer, it is proposed to implement the Java programming language as the preferred platform given its proven success in distributed multi-tier applications that is driven on modularity of individual systems. J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is also considered as a standard as providers often choose to declare their implementations as J2EE compliant (Chetan Sankar, 2006). In the case of the Database layer, the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) will be utilized as it provides the much needed heterogeneous environment for relational ad well as non-relational implementations of database systems. The CLI (Call Level Interface) provided by ODBC provides a vendor neutral interface for ERP applications to communicate with a wide variety of databases, thus increasing their reliability for enterprise applications (Witold, 2008). References 1. Effy Oz (2008), Management Information Systems. New York: Cengage. 2. Witold (2008), Business Information Systems: 11th International Conference. Innsbruck: Springer. 3. Gerald Grant (2003), ERP & data warehousing in organizations: issues and challenges. London: Idea Group. 4. Chetan Sankar (2006), Implementation strategies for SAP R/3 in a multinational organization: lessons from a real-world case study. London: Idea Group. Read More