Caterpillar Tunneling : Revitalizing User Adoption Of Business Intelligence

Critically examining how the decision to implement SAP reflects an organizational perspective on information management, according to Strassman’s (1995) concept, there are five core ideas that are used to maintain Information superiority in a company these are;

The production staffs viewed the adoption of SAP as an ERP system that focuses on function such as inventory, finance, accounting, production, etc. They had doubt about how SAP modules are relevant to their business processes. The production staffs believed the functional view poorly represents the interaction with other functional views.

Its organization would face difficulties to interact and analyze data outside of the silos and create critical insight for decision-making. The IT infrastructure and the organization architecture cannot identify excellence business initiatives to drive the BI project across the organization. Prioritizing or choose a BI project to be implemented is based on the level of commitment from

The primary test business insights appearances are assembling the vital information about the business. The key for get-together information is computerizing the methodology.

The company has decided to use different applications instead of using a single ERP system, which in turns would make their operations smoother. They have chosen to do this in order to be cost efficient and to focus on the specific need so each department uses a different application. That is connected by middleware that they don’t fully understand on how to operate, and are afraid that if they attempt to change it, it would crash all of their system. This in turn makes their operational capabilities not the strongest as it relates to their business model. On the other hand, some of the challenges that they face is that they will not be able to complete all orders or be able to implement improvements due to the increase volume of request that need to be processed during this time. Some of the IT related issues are those that are associated with the different applications that are being used. If an applications crashes then it would hold them up significantly in completing all orders and having them be delivered on time. Primarily the lack of staffing and the lack of IS improvements puts them at a disadvantage against their competitors who more than likely have significant more sophisticated IS infrastructure.

In detail, a strong resistance will come from some of the operating companies that already have “their own small-scale business intelligence applications in place”. These companies may not see any valid reason or advantage to switch and implement a new software system. Furthermore, another obstacle that SYSCO might confront will be the objection from the existing managers and IT experts averse and incapable of using a new software with different functions. Moreover, the forthcoming implementation time of the BI software proposed by the Assistant Vice President of Technology and Applications Twila Day might raise doubts and concerns among management as well as

The IT department of North American Federal Government, a real-estate and property management firm, submitted their proposal for data warehousing in their department. The proposal was sanctioned with an amount of $800,000 with duration of 8 months. In reality, the project exceeded the time of 8 months and lasted for two years. The reasons were business unit stretched the analysis time from one and half months to nine months. Another reason was business unit kept expanding he planned user base. Over a period of six months, the planned manpower increased from 200 to 2500. A formal approval for the use of technology from the Federal Government took a year. But the project was canceled by the IT director

Michael Eubanks of Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) is in charge of the implementation of a business intelligence (BI) system for the company. This implementation began in 2003 and was to be completed in 2005. In 2006, the project is only in the 2nd of 3 phases. He is now faced with a problem. The implementation is going much slower than he anticipated. His goal is to implement BI as soon as possible, so what does he need to do so that he can reach this goal?

The major problem in the first implementation was the ineffective change management practice followed. The stakeholder communication about the ERP system was not managed properly. There was no shared ownership or strategic alignment of the employees to the vision of the company in implementing this system. The employees were not clearly communicated the reasons for getting this ERP system at Bombardier. While some perceived that it would make life easy, others were skeptical. Managers did not show enthusiasm for the project and in many cases, even abdicated their responsibility to propagate the vision and passed this crucial task to the operational level employees. Some stakeholders amongst employees perceived the project to be a top-down initiative and felt disconnected with the broader vision of streamlining the inventory management, which in fact would have positively affected them. Delays further derailed the projects. Business teams and the project teams did not work with a common objective.

The problem that Graybar described in the case was that they were facing pricing pressure from its customers, which resulted in Graybar’s profit margins being squeezed. They were focusing primarily on customers that spent the most money, but that was only a small percentage of their total customer base and they had to learn how to deal with the rest of their customers. Researchers had analyzed the company’s issues and pricing problem before suggesting that Graybar identify each customer to see how costly that customer is to serve. Their technique was to place customers into categories based on their profitability, loyalty, and liability. Additionally, SAP developed a new analytics software (called SAP Customer Value Intelligence), which sped

Twila Day left the meeting excited, but also a little nervous. Her Technology and Applications Group had just been given approval by the Director’s Council of SYSCO to proceed with a company- wide deployment of business intelligence (BI) software. The effort was intended to help SYSCO, the largest food distributor in North America, make better use of the information generated by its operations and serve its customers better. The Director’s Council, a group of senior managers with substantial power and influence, had been impressed enough by the results of a

As most business they knew that proper investment in the Information systems and Information Technology is the best way to go but they dropped the ball when it came to proper investing, they either didn’t realize or ignored the problems

Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world and handles more than one million customer transactions every hour and generates more than 2.5 petabytes of data storage (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). To put this into perspective, this data is equivalent to 167 times the number of books in America’s Library of Congress (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). So how can Wal-Mart use this massive amount of data and what useful information can this data provide? This paper will provide a brief overview of the importance of Business Intelligence (BI) and how the largest retailer in world, Walmart, is using it.

The article by Chandler (2015) “The Business Intelligence and Analytics Leader 's First 100 Days” hit a cord with me after a talk with a friend of mine who was just added to the BI team at his company. The new BI director at my friend’s company could have used this article to help him with his new role of BI director. My friend’s boss came in with prebaked ideas and thought he knew what the company needed from the BI department, but after 380 days the department is still feeling its way around in the dark.

This paper illustrates the concept of Business Intelligence as a stored knowledge of the company that can be developed and organized for better and effective decision making process. It synthesizes the concept of business intelligence and introduces the BI information system software that can harness all the needed information and data for decision makers. This process is placed in the context of mid size companies in Saudi Arabia for them to gain competitive advantage.