Tektronix Inc.: Global ERP Implementation Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Introduction

Almost all the major departments of the company were suffering from lack of integration and all of them were operating independently, which had led the company into a number of problems and its performance had started declining at that time. The financial system of the company was also negatively affected by the lack of integration, which had made it difficult to evaluate which product was performing well and which was not because the closing of books for each month took weeks. In order to deal with these problems, the company had implemented an ERP system into all the divisions, which was executed successfully and addressed all the problems. The company learnt a number of useful strategies from this implementation such as, it had learned that before implementation of a new system, the company should implement it on a trial basis to check its weakness and effectiveness, as it did with the implementation of OMAR in the MBD division. It had also learnt that before implementation of a new program, the company should critically evaluate all the possible risks related to the system, which would help them in reducing the threats of failure in the execution of the program. The implementation of a system in a global based organization would require the management to conduct a comprehensive study of the diverse background of a region and develop a system in their local language, so the new system could address the legal and social requirements of that particular region.

The company should not restrict its dependence to a single software vendor because this will make its performance evaluation and future improvements limited. For the improvement of its performance and optimization of the available resources in the best interest of the company, it should evaluate alternative software that can address the broad range of the company’s problems and needs. The company should also gather all the three divisions at a single platform and introduce a centralized reporting system in the organization instead of independent one. This will provide them an opportunity in making an effective comparison between the performances of each division and increase the effectiveness of these divisions. Although, these three divisions perform different functions independently from one another, but it was necessary to increase coordination among them because in the past few years, it has been observed that due to lack of coordination among these divisions, sales orders were entered multiple times in different systems. This had slowed down the processing of transaction recordings, which had increased the ratio of customer’s dissatisfaction and also increased the chances for order errors to creep into the system. In order to improve the IT infrastructure of the company, it should integrate a cloud based IT system, which would help them in connecting different systems in these three divisions on a single platform. The integration of such system will reduce the company’s IT related expenses and helped them in improving their performance.

After critically evaluating the above discussion, it has been recommended that the company should develop an in-house software solution to address its IT related problems instead of depending upon a third party software provider. This would reduce the cost of implementation and maintenance of the software and provide a long term benefit to the company. Being an autonomous organization the company is enjoying an advantage of being more flexible, which provides an opportunity for the company to adopt it faster with the changing needs and requirements of the external environment. This will help the company in encouraging creativity and innovation, which will increase the impact of standardization over the performance of its new IT system and provides a better visibility and comparability. Moreover, before moving forward and implementing the system globally in all the divisions and subsidiaries of the company, they should plan to go beyond the implementation of ERP only and also try to leverage Information Technology to the next phase of integration, which means that the company should also integrate the advanced practices of IT in the Supply Chain Management..................

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Tektronix reviews in the implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions in all three of its global business units. This case tells the story of the three implementations, each with its own character and requirements. Tektronix managers to synchronize the requirements of each unit with the overall needs of the company to standardize business practices and its desire to join the common business model in the enterprise. Details of business change in a mature business and technical environment. "Hide
by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, George Westerman, All Cotteleer Source: Harvard Business School 22 pages. Publication Date: February 2, 1999. Prod. #: 699043-PDF-ENG