Tektronix Case

1) Briefly list business implications of IT and IS problems at Tektronix.

The lack of integration and evolution coordination between management and information systems at Tektronix have affected the company in my ways:

* Inability to sell off unprofitable businesses, integrate new acquisitions, cut costs and eliminate inefficiencies

* Inability to effectively change business processes

* Lack of visibility into global operations

* Inability to ship up-to-the-minute or Saturday orders

* Need to enter a sales order many times in different systems through the order cycle

* Slow business processing

* Reduced customer service

* Increase of order errors

* Need to manually coordinate orders expedition ("Five calls does it all")

* Incapacity to effectively manage customer accounts and credit on a global basis

* Incapacity to calculate an invoice total for a customer at order creation

* Lack of integration in the financial systems (multiple charts of accounts across the firm)

* Closing the books each month took weeks

* Difficulty to determine profitability of products or divisions

* Ineffective time allocation (employees spend 90% of their time in non-added value activities)

2) What concrete steps did Tektronix take to manage the risks involved in such a large and difficult project?

To manage risks involved in such a difficult project, Tektronix took four concrete steps:

1) Introduction of a strong vision:

* Separability of businesses to ensure that each division will have its own instance of the Customer Fulfillment System and that standardization is preserved within each division

* Implementation of shared services to ensure that substantial cost reductions are achieved through the consolidation of some financial functions and that global, up-to-date view of the company's financial status is accomplished.

* Implementation of "Plain Vanilla" concept to maintain integrity of the software through processes standardization and software maintenance and upgrades simplification

2) Selection of the Oracle ERP solution (which is an outsource rather than a built-in software package) for all Tektronix systems (except for the Manufacturing system - which was recently implemented)

3) Creation of a steering committee to refine the company's vision and to develop a