MALAY NAVINBHAI KHATRI – A00231446

Assignment 1- Systems Integration

1. What do you think of Rolls Royce's ERP implementation project? Did they select the
right implementation strategy?
A. Roll Royce’s ERP execution project secured the social, commerce as well as specialized issue. It
was well structured. The systematically organised permitted Roll Royce to diminish the
implementation risk to a least level and increase the chance of success. From the project team's
perspective, Roll Royce’s project group included major stakeholder to gather the concern and
information from different perspective. Besides, this can too decrease the resistance and increase
the buy-in of the venture. The team member was listed as below:

a. Specialists from EDS: handle 90% of Roll Royce’s IT function

b. SAP consultants: contribute SAP technical knowledge and SAP implementation knowhow

c. Internal staff: contribute knowledge of cross-functional business relationship

d. Subject matter experts: contribute experience of the old legacy systems

For the project implementation project, Roll Royce tackled the predictable problem by covering the
below aspects:

1. Cultural category: This category acted as the role of change management. Project team
explained the benefit of implementing SAP to the company to reduce to resistance. Moreover, a
clear structure of training system allowed project team deliver SAP knowledge to each level of users.

2. Business category: This category handled the business process reengineering. Business team
not only identified the different between existing business processes and the SAP standard process,
but also illustrated the step by step changing approach to the Roll Royce’s employee to support the
existing business processes and the new business processes.

3. Technical category: This category handled the data integration issue. Without conduct a data
cleansing process, the data from old legacy system cannot extract, transform, and load to the
SAP/R3 system.

Yes, Roll Royce correctly applied a step-by-step implementation approach instead of a big-band
approach. Roll Royce SAP project included three phases and they were implemented in sequence to
reduce the risk and cost of failure.

According to Stanley (1998), applied a step-by-step approach can allow Roll Royce to validate the
test data and the data from old legacy system before loading to SAP R/3 system. Moreover, it can
reduce the down time of the legacy system. The most important benefit is allowing the new system
to phase in step by step without hurting the old legacy system and daily business process.

2. Discuss the critical success factors of Rolls Royce's implementation strategy and the
role of SMEs in the project.
A. Critical success factors are the major elements that need to fulfill to successfully implement the
project. Organizational resistance to change is one of the critical successful factors. It measures
about the acceptance level of the Roll Royce’s employee toward the SAP R/3 implementation
MALAY NAVINBHAI KHATRI – A00231446

project. Existing Roll Royce’s employee with sound technical knowledge and higher willingness to
learn and change can reduce the resistance to this critical success factor. In contrast, if the employee
predicts the SAP will change the existing business process dramatically without generating any
significant benefit or affecting employee’s position, a high level of resistance can be generated. In
addition, RR internal staff will generate a high level of resistance if the new SAP system cannot fulfill
the current business processes.

“Go Live” is another critical success factor. No matter how detail the project plan, the practical
implementation plan (Go Live) is the critical step to turn paper work to real work. RR’s two waves
implementation approach provide a higher opportunity of success.

The role of SME was to provide knowledge of the current business processes of different functions
and different business units. SME ensured SAP project team can fully understand and apply correct
modifications to the existing business processes. Moreover, SME supported the change
management by providing training towards different operational business units to reduce the
resistance and uncertain of the project.

3. What advice can you give to Rolls Royce's technical team on their approach of
migrating a legacy system with the SAP software?
A. Roll Royce reduced the implementation cost by modifying the current business processes to fit in
the SAP best practice. However, Roll Royce is one of the giants in engineering industry which
contains different business needs and different business competitive advantages with competitors.
The highly standardized business process may help the Roll Royce to reduce running cost and
increase the production efficient.

However, the research and development department of Roll Royce requires a higher freedom to
generate high quality idea. Thus, Roll Royce is recommended to review the R&D system of SAP
before migrating existing legacy system. The SAP R/3 should provide enough data and freedom for
R&D department to generate insight without affecting the integration of the whole organization.

4. List the horizontal and vertical levels of systems that exist in organizations.
A. Vertical levels of Systems, strategic planning to management control and operation
control. For example, most organizations have their top-level management like CEOs and
presidents to plan the long-term strategy of organizations, whereas midlevel management (e.g.,
vice presidents or general managers) focuses on tactical issues and the execution of organizational
policy to ensure that the company is accomplishing its strategic objectives. The
lower-level management (e.g., supervisors) task is to focus on the day-to-day operations of the
company.

Horizontal levels, planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling. The

POSDCORB categorization became very popular and led to a set of formal organization
functions such as control, management, supervision, and administration

5. What is logical integration and how is it different from physical integration?

A. Logical or Human systems focus on integration of business process and people changes for
successful use of systems by getting people to share information across functional areas with
relative ease. On the other hand, physical systems integration involves building a system
architecture that supports many different applications and gets them to work together
seamlessly.
MALAY NAVINBHAI KHATRI – A00231446

6. Describe at least 5 steps involved in systems integration.

A. Step 1 – Resource categorizing – take inventory of hardware and software and seek vendors that
comply with this technology
Step 2 – Compliance and standards – check to see what kinds of standards are used for database
support JDBC/ODBC
Step 3 – Legacy systems support – develop support for older systems
Step 4 – Middleware tools – tools that are used to support legacy systems, and are a short-term
solution to fixing the problem
Step 5 – Authentication and authorization policies – Create standards that users can login and log
off to create information protection, to hide sensitive information.

7. What are the key benefits and limitations of systems integration?

A. Some of the key benefits to Systems Integration:
• The increase of Revenue and Growth
• Enhanced information visibility
• Standardization of data
• Better business practices and
• Levels the competitive environment with competitors.

Some of the Limitations of Systems Integration:

• High initial setup costs
• ROI with benefits showing up after long time
• Power and Inter-departmental Conflicts.

8. Summarize the role of management in systems integration.

A. Management is the job of assigning resources to tasks. Any large endeavor is composed of many
tasks. The people who actually do the work understand their part of the picture, but they don’t
know the whole picture. The managers understand the parts but they don’t always understand the
details of all the tasks. They may understand a few, especially if they worked their way up from the
bottom of the org chart. What managers do is select people or groups to perform the tasks - who
does what. Managers need to a fair amount of the details of the tasks but there is too much
information there for them to understand it all. They have to work with the people and accept the
fact that they (the managers) don’t know everything.

9. What is the role of management in systems integration in terms of the ethical and
human challenges they face during the systems integration process?
A. Integrated Systems opens up new ways of sharing information between employees it
also provides the opportunity for some employees to gain illegal information for their own use
while at work. This is where ethical and unethical use of information comes in to play. An
organization may have employees that are accessing information that they don’t have a need to
know for. In order for management to avoid this unethical use of information they need to submit
policies and procedures on the ethical use of the system to their employees.

Other challenges that Managers face when integrating system involve cost, especially when it comes
to hardware and software for the updated models. Along with technology challenges there could
also be human challenges. One
of the human challenge may come from the IT department in which will be greatly impacted by
the new system because they will be responsible for supporting and maintaining the new system.
MALAY NAVINBHAI KHATRI – A00231446

Another human challenge may come from the managers that are in charge of certain information,
they may lose control of because of the new system integration.

Considerable challenges involved in the system integration include:

•Lack of trust and unwillingness to share supplier data with the separate exchange
company (e.g. because of missing alignment of goals and insufficient procedures and
protocols):
•Unwillingness to outsource supply-chain operations to a third party especially if the third
party is also hosting a competitor;
•Channel conflict and inability brand products;
•Lack of consensus among partners about where functionality should reside;
•High costs of integrating partner back-office systems with the exchange technology;
•Inability to recruit and integrate suppliers.