Hello World

Ramos, Kriezel B. Jan. 7, 2013

Project Management TTh 5:00 – 6:30 pm

1. Search the internet and scan information technology industry magazines or web sites to find an example of an information technology that had problems due to organizational issues. Write a one to two page paper summarizing who the key stakeholders were for the project and how they influenced the outcome.

Nestle’s Struggle with Enterprise Systems

In the ‘90s to early 2000s, Nestlé had plentiful problems with its value chain. This is apparent from the fact that each factory set up their own vendor masters and purchased on their own which lead to scenario where the company was paying 29 different prices for vanilla from the same vendor. This happened because every plant would buy from the same vendor on their own accord and the vendor in turn would just get whatever it thought it could get. Apparently, every division and every factory had assigned a different name to the same product, which made it impossible for the company to keep track of business transactions and caused excessive overstocking as well as spoilage. Having multiple purchasing systems definitely made matters worse as it prevented Nestlé from leveraging its worldwide buying power to obtain lower prices for raw material. Fortunately, the changes in the company information system and business process resulted in the installment of SAP, an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system and mySAP.com (enable SAP’s system to function in the web environment), which managed to standardize and coordinate the company’s information and was able to produce better sales forecasts. At first it was tough because they had a close deadline. The employees did not have enough time for adjustments and did not even want to learn this new system. The project was called to a halt in June 2000. Nestlé removed the project co-leader and Dunn took over as the sole project leader. In October, Dunn held a three-day offsite retreat with the key...