Week 4 Discussion Comments:

Overall, you did a good job of teaching the class this week. My thoughts of each of your teaching points are shown in the paragraphs below. No one choose to deal with Production Planning and how Bills of Materials and routing information are used in a factory.

Kathy provided us with a good "real world" CRM experience. You can see that real work was required to determine how the organization wanted to use the Blackbaud CRM software and to configure and use it. Kathy's organization selected software from a vendor that had another package already installed in the organization. Sometimes this is based on the assumption that the vendor has a long term interest in making their various packages work together. This is generally true. However, when a vendor has purchased a number of software packages (example: Computer Associates), they may not have long term plans to integrate them.

Mihir provided an overview of all components of ERP rather than selecting just one. The benefits listed are fairly generic to ERP installations that actually work. It is important to remember that benefits stated by the software vendor can only be achieved with the planning, management, user involvement, and executive involvement that you are learning about in this course.

Melinda raised a question about what can be done when the industry and/or technology changes during a long ERP installation project. There was no good answer to this question on the Discussion Board. That's probably because there is no really good answer to this problem. The best answer I can give is that I have never seen a five year project completed according to the plan that was defined at the beginning. For a project this big, I would re-plan after each phase. The new plan might call for two teams in the second phase -- one team to upgrade what had already been done and a second team to install the next phase. In the planning for the second phase, there would be a cost/benefit analysis that would evaluate the trade-offs between waiting on the new technology (project risk of increased scope vs. risk of increased costs or loss of business because of ignoring industry trends and technology).

Melinda also presented Human Resource Management and showed us that there is much more to HRM than maintaining an employee master table and calculating payroll.

Badeya gave us an idea of the functions in Supply Chain Management by showing us a case provided by SAP.