Case Study: Border States Industries Fuels Rapid Growth with Erp

Case Study: Border States Industries Fuels Rapid growth with ERP

1. What problems was Border States Industries encountering as it expanded? What people, organization, and technology factors were responsible for these problems?

The company chose to customize the system extensively, writing its own software to enable the ERP system to interface automatically with systems from other vendors. Converting and cleansing data from BSE’s legacy system took far longer than management anticipated. BSE never fully tested the system as it would be used in a working production environment before the system actually went live. When the Internet brought about the need for additional changes, the existing SAP software did not support these changes. BSE was forced to manually process thousands of transactions outside the SAP system. Border States Industries had used its own legacy enterprise resource planning system since 1988 to support its core business processes. The system though had been designed exclusively for electrical wholesalers. The system could no longer support BSE’s new lines of business and extensive growth. BSE chose enterprise software from SAP AG as its new information system. Even though senior management worked closely with IBM and SAP during the system implementation, day-to-day operations suffered while managers were working on the project. The first group of “expert users” were trained too early in the project and had to be retrained when the new system finally went live. Prior to the implementation, BSE had no experience with SAP software and only had a few consultants familiar with the version of the SAP software that BSE was using. Instead of adopting the best-practice business processes embedded in the SAP software, BSE hired consultants to further customize the SAP software to make its new system look like its old one in certain areas. Because of the extensive customization, the launch date was pushed back four months and the cost of implementation...