Enterprise resource planning installations can provide some real
benefits or some embarrassing headlines when things go wrong. We
recall some high and low points.
Although successful enterprise resource planning projects can
deliver productivity gains and business benefits, when things go
wrong it is not just the IT director that faces problems; the
impact is felt on balance sheets and share prices.
Computer Weekly looks at some of the high and low points of
implementing R/3.
Highs
Disney
This year, the Walt Disney Corporation will complete a £240m global
IT consolidation based on SAP.
The company, which has a £13.65bn annual turnover, operates in 40
countries and is made up of more than 700 separate companies, is
consolidating more than 400 back-end systems to a SAP
platform.
Tom Stauffer, vice-president of the implementation project, said,
"We had multiple implementations of SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle,"
but he said a single ERP system was necessary to create a series of
common business processes across the group and move towards
developing a group-wide shared services model for business
processes.
The final cost of the project will be £240m, but Disney would have
spent that much in the next three to five years on maintaining and
upgrading legacy systems, according to Stauffer.
Pilkington
In June 2003, glassmaker Pilkington attributed a large part of its
£217m annual profit to its IT strategy and specifically its SAP
implementation.
The company was in the middle of a £40m SAP-based project to bring
common business processes to 50 separate IT groups across the world
and put much of its business online.
Steven Pownall, Pilkington Group's IT director, said the global
roll-out resulted in a common set of processes across multiple
business units, providing a common basis for comparison and allowed
shared service centres for human resources and financial
applications.
Thomas Cook
In June 2003, travel firm Thomas Cook revealed it had saved £140m
in the 20 months to November 2002 with an IT transformation project
based on SAP.
The four-year programme helped the company record an £80m
turnaround in net revenue and helped it back to
profitability.
Thomas Cook standardised on SAP as the main software tool for the
group internationally. The £1.7m implementation involved human
resources, financials and business intelligence software for 11,000
employees across its airline, travel agency and tour operator
divisions.
Lows
Hershey
The US chocolate manufacturer admitted in 1999 that problems with a
SAP R/3 implementation meant it fell £70m short on sales
targets.
"Although order patterns have remained strong, we have been unable
to fulfil them in a timely fashion," said chief executive officer
Kenneth Wolfe.
Hershey's problems resulted from difficulties in programming
interfaces between the SAP ERP system, its Manugistics supply
chains and Siebel CRM.
WHSmith
In 2000, WHSmith began rolling out SAP to integrate IT systems in
50 news delivery depots, but the implementation ran into
difficulties within months. The database servers were operating at
70% capacity, with only 15% of WHSmith's operations live on the
system.
"Users could not carry out many operations the system was designed
for. The principal reason for the deterioration in performance was
insufficient processing capacity on the database server," WHSmith
said.
The project, which exceeded its £15m budget by £8m, sparked a
volley of complaints from newsagents, who claimed they were forced
to spend an inordinate amount of time sorting out the system's
teething problems.
ICI
In April 2003, Paul Drechsler, chief executive of ICI subsidiary
Quest, lost his job after problems with a SAP implementation led to
a profits warning and a 40% share price slump.
Quest was to launch ICI into a key market for expansion, but
problems with the SAP project, carried out in partnership with
Xansa, resulted in the company's first quarter sales forecast for
2003 plummeting by nearly 70% as existing customers, unhappy with
unfulfilled orders, jumped ship to buy elsewhere.
