SAP ERP Implementation [ A Case Study of Nestle USA] Research Paper

SAP ERP Implementation [ A Case Study of Nestle USA] - Research Paper Example Providing real time data for distributed systems gives power to the users and thereby the company to work efficiently. Company employees, even though they are working from different locations, would have access to the data and moreover, would be getting the same view of data. But, quite obviously, all this cannot be achieved free of cost. There are different kinds of costs involved including monetary crunch, issues with putting all this into practice, and also people management issues. But, all said and done, each and every ERP implementation has important lessons to be learned from. This leads to say that for a company, what so ever be the result of ERP implementation, the lessons are always significant. The case I would be taking into consideration is the Nestle case. In the year 2000, Nestle SA management team became conscious of the fact that if they want to maintain their position in the hugely competitive market, they need to streamline their processes and upgrade their systems . To serve this purpose, Nestle SA signed a bond with SAP. Nestle SA wanted to implement an ERP system across all its systems, they wanted all the employees and hence, the company to benefit with the ERP system. Back then, Nestle SA had its presence in 80 countries with a total of 230,000 employees overall. A huge sum of $80 million was assigned for the consultation, maintenance and up gradation of the existing systems. A time frame of three years was decided upon in order to complete the ERP implementation for the most competitive sites of Nestle. After the ERP implementation of these sites is completed, the other sites would be dealt with. The implementation included most aspects of a company’s product and operation management processes. They ranged from finance and monetary aspect handling, to supply chain, forecasting, capacity planning and BI segments. Another Nestle ERP implementation was that of Nestle USA. Nestle USA had quite a few different ledgers and customer acce ss points. The objective of implementing ERP implemented in Nestle USA was to consolidate these different data points to just one. Nestle USA faced a lot of challenges in implementing ERP. This was because of the fact that every location for Nestle USA was inclined to make their own decisions. There was a communication gap between decisions made by different locations and this lead to adverse effects on ERP implementation. A classic example of this was the story of Vanilla wherein each and every Nestle USA location had a different deal for vanilla price with the retailer, and the different locations were not even aware of this fact. (Ben, 2002) In spite of which subsidiary of Nestle is observed, the reasons and objectives for implanting ERP were the same. The goal involved grouping, synchronizing and merging all the operations of the firm despite of the distributed locations and nature of working. The ultimate objective was to increase revenue and to maintain the name of Nestle bran d in the highly competitive market. In addition to the mentioned goals, there was an essential necessity to unify and integrate all the company information so that the forecasting activities as well as different forms of data analyses could be done more easily. This would also lead to greater accuracy in deriving trends while doing market research and demand forecasting. Nestle USA did