HS2041 Enterprise Systems | International Gaming Technology

Questions:

In this assignment you need to read a case study on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation and answer three questions. This assignment will let you define and describe the evaluation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. It will also let you examine and judge the role of EPR and their adoption process in organization. Most importantly, you will learn to analyse and develop arguments organisation’s ERP selection, planning, implementation and ongoing support phases. Student will also argue about the roles of key stakeholders in an organisation’s ERP selection, planning, implementation, adoption and ongoing support phases.

Assignment requirements:

Answers:

1.ITC stands for International Gaming Technology. A company who manufactures the game machines especially the slot machine and other gaming related instruments. It is headquartered in London with its offices at Rome, Las Vegas and providence. The company was founded in the year 1990. In the year 2015 the company has earned revenue over 4.7 billion dollars with its total assets over 15 billion dollars with profit over 56 million dollars in the year 2015. The current employee in the company is over 12,000 (Cronan and Douglas 2012).

Initially in 90’s the company’s different department such as the sales, marketing, finance and inventory of the company was managed through different modes and system. There was no common link in the departments to have communication or the exchange the information. Just like other company, International Gaming Technology has different system to manage its department. The trend changed in the year 2002 with the introduction of the enterprise system (Cronan and Douglas 2012). The company started to eliminate their old organization structure and operation and to implement the ERP in their system for the business operation. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is the software which integrates the business sectors which include the sales, finance, marketing, customer relationship, inventory and various other sectors so that there is constant communication and exchange of the data between its departments. For instance if there is the contract of certain products, the sales department will contact the inventory department if there is enough product, from there the inventory department will contact the finance department to calculate the bill for the product and the finance department will forward the bill to the logistics department to deliver the product (Cronan et al 2012). entire process of the communication between the department is taking place with the help of the enterprise software.

IGT goals for adapting the ERP software are:

• Without the ERP system the company has to depend on different host to manage its business operation. Moreover there was no single mode which will help the employee to look into different sectors of the business to access the information (Charland 2014). The ERP applications integrated all the core business application and solve the people dilemma which enabled them to use the ERP software.
• Secondly the company wanted a more efficient information technology infrastructure in the company that would elevate the overall operation of the company, moreover the company had huge amount of data in their application that was not be utilized properly for production (Cronan et al 2012). With the help of the ERP software the data flow was smooth and efficient within the department and the entire data was accounted which the company was lacking upon.
• Before the ERP the employees were inefficient in their work and neglected various process and operation which was overseen by the company. with the introduction of the ERP system every process was carried out online under the watch of the software, now the employee who neglected the operation were get notices due to the software (Cheng et al 2013). Thus the ERP software implemented a sense of discipline in the business operations.  

2.The customization of the business operation to the ERP software has been the challenging jobs for the business people according to the report of the consulting firm the panaroma consulting firm only 5 percent of the total coma y in the world has perfect customization to the ERP software and the remaining 95 percent. The 40 percent of the company has manor or little customization to the ERP software.

Figure 1: Statics Implementing the Usage of the ERP

Thus the above statics implements the usage of the ERP software has been very poor. Various reasons can be the explanation of the statics. Some of them are:

The upgrades: The upgrade in the ERP software is complex, costly and risky which has enabled various organizations to not upgrade their ERP software which can be the reason for the minor customization

The customization change the business organization structure: other reason for the poor customization is that with the customization the entire business structure has to be changed which makes various companies reluctant to the changes (S.H. and Shih 2013).

Analyzing the Cons there are various pros of customizing the software:

change is the rule of the business: the main pros of customization of the business is that the upgraded ERP software will be better than the previous one, therefore the upgraded software will make the operation of the business more efficient and productive (Leon 2014).

Customization will give competitive advantage:  From the statics it is known that only five percent of the company has perfect customization of the ERP software. It is implied that these companies are using a better and advanced version of the  ERP software which means that their business are more efficient and quick than the other 95 percent which will give them a competitive advantage over other business.

3.In the year 2003 the IGT Company has implemented the Enterprise system of the SAP Company. From the above statics to gain the competitive advantage in the market the company needs to update the ERP software whenever required (Van Der Zee, Holkenborg and Robinson 2012. The company has improved significantly in its operation after implementing the ERP for instance it has revamped its warehouse management to deliver the system parts faster. For effective change management the company, firstly there should be proper communication among the organization so that each employee should understand the need for the change and implementation of the ERP (Herzig, Ameling and Schill 2012). Secondly the organization should give a proper training to each employee in using the ERP so that they can quickly adapt to the software. Lastly the company should prepare an analysis report on who will get affected with the ERP implementation. It will help the company to know the amount of involvement of each stake holder and how much training should be given to each employee to understand the software.

References

Cheng, Y.M., Lou, S.J., Kuo, S.H. and Shih, R.C., 2013. Investigating elementary school students' technology acceptance by applying digital game-based learning to environmental education. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 29(1). Cheng, Y.M., Lou, S.J., Kuo, S.H. and Shih, R.C., 2013. Investigating elementary school students' technology acceptance by applying digital game-based learning to environmental education. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 29(1).

Cronan, T.P. and Douglas, D.E., 2012. A student ERP simulation game: A longitudinal study. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 53(1), pp.3-13.

Cronan, T.P. and Douglas, D.E., 2012. A student ERP simulation game: A longitudinal study. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 53(1), pp.3-13.

Cronan, T.P. and Douglas, D.E., 2012., P.M., Robert, J., Babin, G., Lyle, D., Cronan, P. and Charland, P., 2014. ERP simulation game: a distribution game to teach the value of integrated systems. Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, 37.

Cronan, T.P., Léger, P.M., Robert, J., Babin, G. and Charland, P., 2012. Comparing objective measures and perceptions of cognitive learning in an ERP simulation game: a research note. Simulation & Gaming, 43(4), pp.461-480.

Herzig, P., Ameling, M. and Schill, A., 2012, August. A generic platform for enterprise gamification. In Software Architecture (WICSA) and European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), 2012 Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on (pp. 219-223). IEEE.

Leon, A., 2014. Enterprise resource planning. McGraw-Hill Education.

Van Der Zee, D.J., Holkenborg, B. and Robinson, S., 2012. Conceptual modeling for simulation-based serious gaming. Decision Support Systems, 54(1), pp.33-45.