Riordan Manufacturing Case

SR-rm-004 part 1

Your Name

BSA 375

Date

Your Instructor

SR-rm-004

Company Profile

Riordan Manufacturing, Inc. is an industry leader in plastic injection molding. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. Since formation in 1991 the company has acquired other companies with production facilities. Each of the acquired locations currently has their own IT systems in place. The company currently has facilities in Pontiac, Michigan, Albany, Georgia, and Hangzhou, China.

Proposed Upgrade

At present the company uses different information systems for finance and accounting, sales and marketing, human resources and general operations at each facility requiring much of the data to be converted to various formats in order to be shared with the corporate office. Some of the systems are computerized while others use pencil and paper to maintain records.

Riordan employs approximately 550 people. All of the offices have different network topologies, but they all have a T1 line coming in. The information system upgrade that would be the most practical and beneficial would be to set up the corporate office to provide resources such as software and programs through a hosted environment or cloud computing. Creating a VPN tunnel from each office to headquarters would ensure security of sensitive material.

By deploying a hosted structure, this would allow each facility to keep their current hardware configuration and would not interfere with operations. The The San Jose location would require two additional servers be brought online; one to host the companies remote environments and provide program access to all locations and the other as a SQL server to maintain their database information.

At the corporate level, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and a SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) such as Report Builder 3.0 would be installed on the SQL server allowing for customized access, maintenance, and retrieval of company data. (Use SQL Server Management Studio)

Using a hosted environment will allow Riordan to control all of the software their companies are using which will allow for standardization of practices. Hosting all of the programs will allow the company to consolidate licensing and purchasing issues.

All employees, including sales and marketing, would be able to have access to required company information by creating rules and permissions through their own profile via a user interface through VPN and remote desktop.

Riordan can decide if they wish to use third party vendors for their software or use in house talent in the IT departments to develop custom reports and automate processes. SSMS allows for importing reports in different formats and converting them all using SSRS to a more consistent and useable database architecture. Reports that are currently being run using Crystal Reports, Cyber Query, Access, Excel, Quickbooks or Peachtree for example could all be converted to the same language (SQL) entered into the databases and then deployed to the appropriate facility from the corporate office. This would develop a more capable IT staff at the corporate level while reducing the others to a support role. Separating all of the departments efficiently will allow for better database manipulation for reporting.

Another feature of an SSRS system is the dashboard. The dashboard allows all executives and management to see all their vital reports on a single desktop, with the ability to drill down to the individual invoice or transaction if necessary. Using the graphs and charts available, makes it much easier to monitor progress and discover trends that get clouded by numbers in typical Excel spreadsheets. (SQL Server 2012 Reporting)

A HRIS system based on PHP/SQL web pages would be easy to update and maintain. This type of system can also be used