Introduction
ACME Auto Rental (AAR) is an auto rental company which has presence in two locations in the United States namely in Dubuque, Iowa and the other site of the company is located in the New York region. The company needs to integrate the entire business systems and functions between the two business units so that the company’s main goal is to be achieved which remains on expanding the auto rental services.
Furthermore, the current business structure of the company between the two locations is independent where each location have their own Internet Service Provider (ISP). The information between the two locations is carried out through via emails and through papers, while collaboration between the locations is carried out through Squirrel Mail.
The company does not have a Chief Information Officer or director, or any Information Management Team infrastructure which has created problems for the company in the integration of the two locations. Moreover, the resources available in the Iowa location includes 50 PC’s for their 50 employees amongst which 10 employees have been using PC’s which has XP legacy system installed while the other 40 employees are using PC’s which have Windows Vista installed. While considering the office located in New York, the company have 200 employees working which have 200 PC’s in which 50 employees have been working in Windows Vista while other 150 employees are using PC’s which have Windows 7 installed.
The paper attempts to describe the background of the case along with the challenges faced by AAR. The paper also attempts to describes the drivers for the company to achieve integration between the two locations, whereas, the business requirements to carry out a successful integration. Furthermore, the paper highlights the role of customers and vendors in the particular integration between departments and locations. Lastly, the paper provides a brief summary of the entire paper at the end.
Discussion
Role of Customers
The role of customer is important while integrating the various processes and departments of one office towards another. Through the installation of Enterprise Resource System (ERP), the company would be able to integrate its customers for its auto retail so that it better serve its customers. An ERP system integrates the internal and external information of an organization through which the company manages its various functions in the business(Cunha & Manuela, 2010).
ERP maintains and tracks customer information one single data set through which the company could outline the buying behaviors to target these customer effectively. Through integration of core business practices for different locations in a single application, it helps in the increase in customer responsiveness and tends to improve customer awareness(Harrigan, 2003).
Strategic Planning
The particular step is very crucial in the implementation of ERP system that could integrate the various business practices and functions between the two offices of AAR. In this section, the company assigns a project team which is based on employees which belong to different departments. These employees are from the sales department, customer services, operations, supply chain, purchasing, accounting, and human resource(Harwood, 2003).
Each team member shall be assigned with an individual and specific task, while the team need to be selected on the basis of knowledge of each team member. The team member would be examining the current business structure for the organization and offices which needs to be integrated and perform an analysis on what shall be improved. The team needs to make sure that each of the business unit or office located must have an updated procedures and processes in order to further process integration(Harwood, 2003).
Acme Auto Rental Integration Case Solution
Along with this, the objectives of the ERP tasks must be defined before implementing the ERP system for integration. The objective in the case of AAR involves expanding the auto rental business in to various regions of the United States due to which the company needs to integrate the two local offices so that the processes become standardized. Lastly, the team is needed to develop a project plan in which the company would provide the timelines, training and education of employees, goals for the future working of the two business units.(Harwood, 2003)
Procedure Review
The main features for the second step includes reviewing of the capabilities for the software which needs to be incorporated, identification of the manual processes, and development of the standard procedures(Cunha & Manuela, 2010).........................
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