Key concept applications in practice
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) is the world's leading producer of healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical devices with annual revenues for their latest fiscal year of $61.5B and Net Income of $13.3B, operating in 57 nations and selling into over 175 countries (Johnson & Johnson Investor Relations, 2012). While the company operates across a very broad value chain, it has successfully integrated many of the core supplier management, procurement, strategic capacity planning and constraint-based planning into a centralized strategy (Atherton, Kleiner, 1998). Integrating these elements together has given Johnson & Johnson greater agility and accuracy in managing aberrations in quality and supplier performance, stabilizing both end-product quality and manufacturing performance at the same time (Slobodow, Abdullah, Babuschak, 2008). From the most basic aspects of job design to the development of its strategic sourcing and strategic capacity planning, Johnson & Johnson concentrates on creating a platform to ensure their Total Quality Management (TQM) and House of Quality ongoing efforts stay synchronized corporate-wide (Johnson, 1993). This makes constraint-based planning and manufacturing execution systems (MES) more effective, while also minimizing the level of demand and process/product variability, leading to accelerated new product development cycles and more profitable medical products (Atherton, Kleiner, 1998). What Johnson & Johnson has been able to do is unify their entire value chain to deal with these aspects of constraint-based planning. As the company is very metrics- and quantitatively-driven, production managers and company executives know the relative level of success or failure for each of these areas relatively quickly based on the use of real-time analytics and dashboards that include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (Atherton, Kleiner, 1998). This mindset around measuring and quantifying performance is predicated on the company's approach to delivering business value by ensuring the entire value chain is transparent from a strategic capacity planning and risk management perspective (Williams, 2004). Johnson & Johnson has learned over decades of work on their constraint-based planning systems that creating a high level of supply chain, sourcing, route assurance, non-conformance and traceability visibility throughout their value chain can save millions of dollar a year and thousands of cumulative hours (Atherton, Kleiner, 1998). The next section discusses how the company uses capacity and constraint-based planning to better manager their value chain.
Integration of content for comprehensive understanding of module concepts
Never before has the creation, aggregation, aligning of information to the needs of an enterprise and its effective and secure use meant more to the viability of businesses globally. The most powerful lesson learned in this course is that data, information and knowledge are the most powerful competitive forces any enterprise can rely on today to differentiate itself in maturing markets while seeking out entirely new, high growth opportunities. The combining of analytics, advanced accounting and financial reporting applications, pervasive adoption of enterprise applications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and many other tasks are accelerating how quickly enterprises can minimize risks while seizing opportunities. Another invaluable lesson learned in this course is how critical it is to plan for change from a personnel, process and systems perspective. The combining of people, processes and systems is critically important for the technologies that the many systems are based on to succeed. This course has shown that only by concentrating on people as the most critical part of any technology-related and automation-based strategy will any effort succeed. It is the ability to manage change and mitigate the resistance to it while automating key tasks through an enterprise-wide strategy that delivers the most effective and longest-landing benefits. The integrating of people, processes and systems in a triad that is framed with a governance framework that ensures consistency and ethical operation is essential to compete in the 21rst century.
Setting The Foundations Of A Learning Framework
Throughout this course the foundational elements and concepts of how to be an Information Technologies (IT) strategist have been learned. As this course progressed my perception of what an IT leader has changed. From seeing the CIO as the leader of IT systems definition, deployment and management to seeing the same role as more of a strategist that relies on IT systems to assist in strategic objectives being attained, my perception of what kind of CIO I want to be has drastically changed. No longer wanting to be the provider of the IT dial tone, I want to be an IT strategist that leads enterprises to attain their strategic goals through the intelligent use of technologies. This shift in perception of what a technology leader is, and has been in the past compared to what needs to be done in the future, was very illuminating.
The delineation of the foundational elements of any IT system, including how to delineate data from information and how to transform tacit and explicit knowedlge into expertise, all have been learned in this course. These concepts, along with the many techniques learned regarding change management, governance, and the need to align IT systems to strategic plans and initiatives, made this class a pivotal one. The many processes that are required for transforming data and information to knowledge can lead any IT department to become myopic; only by concentrating on the overarching strategic objectives and plans, and continually asking who is being served with the efforts of IT departments can any strategy hope to succeed. The cases studied and the cautionary tales of failed IT projects all reverberate with a common thread of losing sight of just who the customer for the programs or projects were and why the systems were developed in the first place. These cautionary tales also showed how powerful successful change management programs are, specifically how IT and business leaders need to concentrate on relying on technology-based systems to support the sociotechnical aspects of an enterprise. The sociotechnical aspects of any enterprise need to be kept in balance as technology is used to bring greater accuracy, clarity, insight, intelligence, knowledge and precision into the decision-making processes of enterprises. Orchestrating all of these factors in unison with each other makes the galvanizing force of a strategic plan and its associated objectives a critical aspect of any IT strategy.
Successful Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems
Introduction
As organizations both private and public continue to grow in complexity and sheer size, enterprise resource planning (ERP) has become an increasingly important function in order to effectively and efficiently carry out operations an ensure stability and longevity. The use of information technologies and a variety of different theoretical frameworks has been applied to ERP problems and successes in both empirical and academic research undertaken in the field, and many recommendations and other conclusions have been reached. There has been a much greater use and investigation of ERP technologies and frameworks in the private sector than by public entities and organizations, however, and thus the potential for research of ERP in public settings as well as, of course, the published