Reengineering business process - Case Study Example

This ever increasing competition necessitated the company to contemplate about the provision of information on various matters including marketing at appropriate time points. However, contrary to the expectations of its well wishers, the superannuated legacy systems used by the company had serious flaws in their architecture which impaired the achievement of organizational effectiveness and strategic objectives. The critical problem associated with structure of legacy systems was its inability to integrate and become compatible with other systems.

To overcome these shortcomings and survive in the industry, the company decided to re-engineer the global supply chain namely PRIDE project (Process re-engineering through Information Delivery Excellence). As a part of the re-engineering programme, implementation SAP/R3 is a critical endeavour to become a truly global company (Scott and Vessey, 2002). The company believes that implementing SAP, which is an enterprise-wide solution, will integrate all the core functions of the organization comprising of Sales, Finance, Accounting, Logistics, Manufacturing, and HR.

The centralized database and integrated architecture of SAP facilitates smooth flow of information across departments, eliminates data redundancy and provides a broader picture of the organization to management. The present essay is an attempt to evaluate and critically analyze the re-engineering programme of Dow Corning Corporation in term of organisational learning, project management and risk management. The essay takes a descriptive approach wherein all the requirements of an effective and workable re-engineering project are discussed in detail.

The essay also suggests certain measures by which the project can be made operational and successful. Project ManagementProject management is commonly understood as the process of planning, monitoring and controlling a project so as to achieve its objectives on time and as per specific budget, quality and performance (Atkinson, 1999). The successful ERP implementation needs many resources and factors and Al-Mashari at al. (2003) have developed the critical actors of ERP success and these factors can be shown as in Figure 2.

After the analysis of Dow Corning ERP case, it has been observed that the company brought in many resources for the successful implementation of ERP. At the same time, it has also been noticed that the company neglected some areas completely and it is recommended that these areas are to be improved in future. The pre-implementation factors which have been observed as critical success factors are bifurcated into three stages, namely pre-implementation, implementation and post-implementation. All these different stages involve many activities/efforts, all of which are briefed as below:Pre-implementation Stage1.

Vision and PlanningPlanning is indispensable for all activities in business, particularly for strategic operations. As the first move towards re-engineering, Dow Corning aligned IT strategy with its business strategy. This is followed by major changes in the existing in IT function. First, the company formed a new committee, the Process and IT Board. Second, a new business unit called BPIT (business processes and IT)