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Essay on Whirlpool Corporation - Giving Erp a Spin

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Jennifer Hillman February 26, 2013 Whirlpool Corporation – Giving ERP a Spin 1. How was the organization prepared for the change? Whirlpool thought they were ready to go live with SAP until September 18, 1999. Whirlpool seemed to be making all the right moves, like dispatcher assignment, having centralized pricing, and vendor interfacing. Even the best laid plans don’t always work. Everything seemed to be going smoothly at first because there were only 1000 system users, once 4,000 users were on the system, performance deteriorated which lead to 4-8 weeks delivery delays to which some customer cancelled their order and went with a competitor. Whirlpool should never have gone live until they realized what impact the red flags…show more content…
The interfaces was too complex and there was a lack of management participation 5. Evaluate the steps that were taken in the ERP activities. Which were done well and which could be improved? The dispatcher assignment –the fact that Whirlpool will consolidated 22 field offices into one hub, even though it takes away the intimate knowledge, it still saves money. Centralized Pricing – no wonder it takes 110 days to reprice its entire product line, when you are trying to manage an 180,000 line report. The centralized pricing will make Whirlpool more competitive in its 170 countries worldwide. Very smart move. Vendor interface – the fact that Whirlpool will save $600,000 a year to move to Easy EDI is a no brainer. It will also allow the customer to have accurate data on their orders along with better customer satisfaction. Remember the best customer is a return customer. 6. Do you think SAP should be held accountable for any of the problems faced by Whirlpool? Why? Yes I think SAP should be held responsible, after all it is their systems and name that were on the line. If they knew that there were Red Flags, why would they allow Whirlpool to make the decision to go-live? Even though SAP said that many companies have multiple Red Flags and hundreds of little problems, when compared to just two that Whirlpool had, SAP
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