Harley Davidson Motor Company: Enterprise Software Selection (Case analysis)
Case description
“This case focuses on a change program and selection of an enterprise software vendor. The decision of which partner to choose to help the company change the way it purchased raised fundamental tensions within the company”.
Question 1
Consider Exhibit 10 on page 22 of the case; does it include the factors you consider most important in the selection process? Which factors would you be inclined to weight most heavily?
I think Harley Davidson did a very good job selecting the evaluation criteria. From the functional criteria, I consider Receiving, Supply Management and Project Tracking the most important functionalities. The others are mainly
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All companies provided a very satisfactory proposal in terms of functionality. All of them met our requirements by more than 90%. What will definitely act as a tie-breaker is the cultural binding that they might have with us. This is a crucial factor, because we are proposing a bold change and employees need to be accompanied and motivated. We have to make sure the provider knows our philosophy and culture. That will ensure that implementation, training and the change management go as smoothly as possible. No matter how good is the software in terms of functionality, if change and people are not managed carefully, the whole project risks failure. For that reason, our recommendation is provider 1. As top executives are often very sensitive to money issues, I would also stress the fact that provider 1 is the most cost effective option.
Question 4
What is your overall assessment of Harley’s approach to enterprise software selection? What (if anything) would you have done differently?
Overall, in my opinion, they had an excellent approach to the whole process. They took the time to do it right. They spend almost a year indoctrinating the strategy, creating enthusiasm and commitment around it, within the company. As for the software selection, they made sure that all departments or groups that would be subject to the change, made part of the process.
There’s, however, one
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Parties to the Case, Facts of the Case, and Business Reasons for the Dispute (30 points)
Today’s companies are challenged by frequent changes in market demands and consumers’ desires for new products and services. Companies which fail to adapt to these changing conditions often find themselves struggling to survive. This is the situation for the Texas Plant, as described in the case study by Pryor, Humphreys, and Taneja (2011). The Vice President, Human Resources Director, and Organizational Development Manager find themselves not only facing the struggles of transforming the Texas Plant, but also the difficulties of working together to achieve it. The following paper describes these difficulties and examines how the actions of the leaders impacted the change process. Recommendations to assist the plant’s leadership in moving forward will be offered.
“This case focuses on a change program and selection of an enterprise software vendor. The decision of which partner to choose to help the company change the way it purchased raised fundamental tensions within the company”.
What change is right for our situation?: The change program should be adapted to the company and its particular business situation.
The purpose of this book is to make us see that nearly all-operating prescriptions for creating large-scale corporate change are nothing but myths and that changes do not happen from one day to another by a miracle, the change from good to great is the result of a successful plan who
The case-based coding method ensures that judges’ votes on minor claims will not dilute the data and be given the same weight as the critical issues. In addition, the data coded on case-basis is also more manageable since its size is only about one third of the size of the claim-based data. However, the disadvantage of coding the data on case-basis appears in situations where the proceeding includes several separate but equally important issues. In those circumstances, judges’ votes on some issues must be discard under the case-based coding method. While there is no objective guideline about how to measure the importance of each issue, the process of selecting the “most critical issue” is highly subjective and
2. Based on the information in the case, which provider would you select (and why)? Argue in favor of and against each vendor before arriving at the final decision?
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5. Rank the judges within each court. State the criteria you used and provide a rationale for your