Hershey's Food Corporation: Erp Failure

Enterprise resource Planning (ERP) is any integrated cross-functional software that reengineers manufacturing, distribution, finance, human resources and other basic business processes of a company to improve its efficiency, agility and profitability.1 On an initial view, an ERP system appears to be the cure for any company’s issues. The installation of such a system offers an organization the opportunity to re-structure their procedures, to coordinate branches’ systems in other geographic locations, unify information and inspire employees via granting them permission to company information. Now these chances exist at heightened costs financially. There are also implementation horrors and labor issues with which must be dealt with. A

The aluminum company is “a global leader in lightweight metals technology, manufacturing and engineering” and “pioneered the aluminum industry over 125 years ago, and today, 59,000 people in 30 countries deliver value-add products made of titanium, nickel and aluminum and produce best-in-class bauxite, alumina and primary aluminum products.” (Alcoa) Since 2001, Alcoa has been able to maintain a successful ERP system with modules including human resources management, OTC, financial management, business process management, and RTP. Alcoa understood that a company this large, would have a complex ERP implementation, thus why they chose to take on different regions in stages. “Their first 50 branches in Europe of the implementation of financial and demand-payment process module, the module currently including Europe, North America, Australia, Asia and South America, the branches of the widely used. HR module has been completed in Australia branch, and Europe and Latin America, is expected to end at the end of the year. OTC module in the aluminum company is all the global offices ta least 60% complete.” (Modern Enterprise Management) For such an implementation to succeed, the company must have flexibility, adaptation, correct scheduling, and streamlining, which Alcoa managed successfully with the correct planning before installation to the ERP system.

Kumar, P. (2010). Successful implementation of ERP in a large organization International journal of engineering science and technology. Vol. 2(7), 3218-3224. Retrieved from http://www.ijest.info/docs/IJEST10-02-07-151.pdf

Cisco made an error when implementing the ERP system by not testing the system withthe full load. It was not fully prepared to take on all of the tasks that Cisco planned for it to do.They should have tested all of the many individual processes at the same time instead ofseparately. Cisco also did not plan on having to modify

The company had been using a shared-services vision, where purchasing, finance, and information resources were provided via shared services that left the divisions with the customer-facing work. Therefore, Mead used the entire suite of SAP modules except human resources and installed a recent module, Advanced Optimization Planning (AOP), which handles all planning and scheduling. However, SAP was not the perfect solution as it unified the company, but it was a large and complex system and it required strict adherence to its rules. ERP was experimental in 1995; reverse auctions and Web applications were experimental in 2002. Implementing ERP has leveraged resources and central design and thus solved many of the problems and issues the company used to struggle with. ERP helped in easy decision-making as if a business unit wanted to make a change, they needed to have conversations with the others, in terms of what was good for the whole. "The answer might not be reached as quickly, but it is a more effective answer," states McGrane. Standardization and globalization has forced real business discussions to occur as well as

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.

This article presents a clear understanding of the critical success factors, software selection steps and implementation procedures involved in successful ERP system implementation. This article majorly covers topics regarding evolution, benefits and significance and pitfalls of the ERP systems as well as critical success factors and ERP system selection. This article is a helpful resource for getting an overview of the implementation procedures and critical success factors of ERP systems and companies can use this as a powerful tool to develop strategies and techniques to manage their

ERPs are notoriously difficult and time consuming to install since they impact all areas of a business’s processes. Forty percent of all ERP installations are only completed partially and another twenty percent are complete failures resulting in a removal of the system (Yick, 2011). This leaves successful, complete, ERP implementations in the minority and NIBCO’s selection committee did not want to create additional opportunities to fail, especially with the data issues that were occurring with their legacy systems (Brown, DeHaynes, Hoffer, Martin, & Perkins, 2012).

Introduction...................................................................................................................... 2 2. Discussion and Analysis ................................................................................................... 4 2.1 Critical factors in ERP implementation ........................................................................... 4 2.2 Critical challenges with ERP implementation .................................................................. 6 2.3 Factors driving ERP implementation challenges .............................................................. 7 3. Statistics on ERP implementation...................................................................................... 8 4. Changes needed for successful ERP implementation.......................................................... 9 5.

ERP implementation is unlikely experience that any company will have. It has to be planned prepared and stimulated from the entire stakeholder otherwise it will sunk the millions of dollar and it drain the companies market. In case of Nestle USA, it confronted a lot of difficulties due to improper implementation plan yet be able to recover as a successful project. Many organisations have gone through the similar situation that there are plenty of lesson to be learned. We can conclude that ERP implementation needs big consideration on business requirement, business process reengineering, stakeholder’s involvement, hardware and software and other units.

The problem presented by Joseph-Armand Bombardier is the upcoming third round of ERP implementation in his organization. Even though a big improvement over the efficiency and success of execution between the first ERP round (Mirabel plant) and second round (Saint-Laurent plant), there is still room for improvement.

NIBCO’s Inc. is a midsized manufacturer of values and pipe fitting headquartered in Elkhart, Indiana (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins, 2012, p.468). NIBCO had over 3000 employees and reported $461 million annual revenue. The company implemented SAP R/3 among its ten plants and four new distribution centers. Top management did not take the advice of their consultants concerning taking a slower approach instead of the BIG Bang approach, instead they decided to go along with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to eliminate the legacy system and replace them with

This paper investigates the implementation of ERP project at FoxMeyer Drugs in 1993. The paper will identify lessons learnt from the failure of the project implementation. However a critical analysis of what went right and wrong will be carried out.

Anderson (2014) said “ERP implementations rarely fail in formulation; however, they frequently fail in implementation.” It does not in with just purchasing an ERP system. A well designed implementation plan is the company’s ticket to success. A well designed implementation plan addresses all potential bottlenecks like execution problems such as lack of training, attitude and participation of the entire workforce from leaders to staff, and member selection for the whole ERP project implementation team. An ERP project is

Enterprise recourse planning (ERP) is a business software that is a suite of applications intended to organize the business processes starting with planning to the point of shipping and payment. ERP operates in real time providing a shared database that supports the business process. It follows a consistent manner of tracking all aspects of the business across all functions and departments. offering so many levels for different management needs because it has the ability to customize the information as needed. This implementation paper will focus on HERSHEY FOODS CORPORATION by investigating and highlighting the reasons behind the catastrophe that Hershey foods corporation faced when implemented the ERP.