Tektronix Case
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Briefly list business implications of IT and IS problems at Tektronix.
The lack of integration and evolution coordination between management and information systems at Tektronix have affected the company in my ways:
Inability to sell off unprofitable businesses, integrate new acquisitions, cut costs and eliminate inefficiencies
Inability to effectively change business processes
Lack of visibility into global operations
Inability to ship up-to-the-minute or Saturday orders
Need to enter a sales order many times in different systems through the order cycle
Slow business processing
Reduced customer service
Increase of order errors
Need to manually coordinate orders expedition (“Five calls does it all”)
Incapacity to effectively manage customer accounts and credit on a global basis
Incapacity to calculate an invoice total for a customer at order creation
Lack of integration in the financial systems (multiple charts of accounts across the firm)
Closing the books each month took weeks
Difficulty to determine profitability of products or divisions
Ineffective time allocation (employees spend 90% of their time in non-added value activities)
What concrete steps did Tektronix take to manage the risks involved in such a large and difficult project?
To manage risks involved in such a difficult project, Tektronix took four concrete steps:
Introduction of a strong vision:
Separability of businesses to ensure that each division will have its own instance of the Customer Fulfillment System and that standardization is preserved within each division
Implementation of shared services to ensure that substantial cost reductions are achieved through the consolidation of some financial functions and that global, up-to-date view of the companys financial status is accomplished.
Implementation of “Plain Vanilla” concept to maintain integrity of the software through processes standardization and software maintenance and upgrades simplification
Selection of the Oracle ERP solution (which is an outsource rather than a built-in software package) for all Tektronix systems (except for the Manufacturing system – which was recently implemented)
Creation of a steering committee to refine the companys vision and to develop a