Managing a Systems Development Project at Consumer Products, Inc.
Managing Information Technology
Abstract
This paper will describe how a large international corporation tries to implement a new company wide system and explain the details of what needs to be done to successfully manage a project of this magnitude. The paper will also provide a brief background on how intricate the ground work is to development a new system. Lastly, the paper will discuss how the absence one employee could potentially derail the project and insights on how the project can be put back on track.
Payable Audit System
Consumer and Industrial Products Company, Inc. (CIPI), is a Fortune 100 manufacturing company known for its products in consumer and industry. CIPI is based in the United States however, with manufacturing worldwide. The overdue need for reevaluation of the Payable Audit System (PAS) is a main priority for upper management. CIPI is a very labor intensive company and a need to develop a new system to increase productivity and increase over all total quality management (TQM). (Brown, C. et al. p.432)
CIPI is experiencing a great deal of delays with the current PAS and how CIPI purchases goods; receive goods and pay for them. CIPI has challenges with redundancy and the lack of productivity in their current system. In fact, some vendors have known to wait 30-60 days before they are paid. For smaller vendors, this could mean major cash flow issues, inability to pay employees and even bankruptcy. All of this was unacceptable and a new system was badly needed. (Brown, C. et al. p.432)
Essential changes were handed down within the organization providing the changes that needed to be implemented and the steps that were required however, after nine months, very little had changed and management realized that real drastic changes needed to be carried out from the ground up. Frequently accounts payable (AP) personnel world did not think outside AP world. They...