Essay About Customer Needs And Scale Of The Vendor

Lap India Case
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ASSIGNMENT-2Founded in 1962, LAP is now India’s largest, and Asia’s third-largest, manufacturer and supplier of decorative and industrial coatings. The firm operates 22 paint manufacturing plants in 18 countries, supplying paint and ancillary products to consumer and commercial markets. A team of  1,100 sales representatives connects with a network of more than 34,000 dealers in India – creating unique business challenges as the company copes with  seasonal demands and services dealers from more than 100 company warehouses storing 3,000  stock-keeping units (SKUs). As the company grows, it plans to further differentiate itself by promising dealers a four-hour cycle from order placement to fulfilment. The only way to achieve this goal is through real-time analytics capable of informing campaigns, tracking product lift and costs, and ensuring service-level agreements are met        complexity of LAP’s business. The company serves a highly diverse market, with customer needs changing seasonally across several continents. LAP deems it necessary to enable its sales force with tablets and mobile devices to tap the customer preferences in real-time and informs their manufacturing plants accordingly to react to the necessary changes. In the midst of this transformation, LAP saw the need for improved communication among salespeople and managers in order to optimize outcomes by implementing an enterprise-wide system. What are the few factors that LAP must consider while selecting a vendor for their ERP implementation? (10 marks)Ans:Few factors are:1. Scale of the Vendor  : LAP, having manufacturing plants in 18 countries serving several continents spreads its business over a huge scale and hence the size of the vendor should match that of the company .The vendor should not be too small to survive and fail to provide constant service. The vendor should be assessed on the type and scale of industry it has served to. The vendor should have served industries over various geographies. 2. Provision for Customization and upgrade path: Since the company serves a highly diverse market with customer needs changing every season, if the application is customized, the vendor should be assessed for the service they offer in this and the cost involved. Due to constant change in the needs, the software might need to be updated on a frequent basis thus the upgrade path offered should be assessed along with its cost. The vendor’s user-base involvement should be high in defining future functional changes.