Agency Y is a federal agency with 10,000 employees and a budget of $1B. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the organization’s offices and employees are geographically dispersed across all 50 states, as well as U.S. territories.
Business situation
Agency Y is responsible for monitoring the nation’s food supply to ensure domestically and internationally produced agricultural products meet specific health and regulatory standards before being sold and distributed to the American public.
Problem statement
In order to better identify, target, and isolate sources of food contamination and alert consumers who may have purchased these goods, Agency Y is considering implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. ERP is the process of using technology to streamline the management of main business functions.
Key Considerations:
Agency Y is a massive organization that maintains hundreds of office locations across the country.
Agency Y works very closely with a variety of external third parties, including agriculture suppliers, vendors, farmers, manufacturers, and wholesale exchanges to ensure that products meet national regulatory standards.
The ERP system should maintain capabilities to automatically track shipments, producing both electronic and paper records.
IT infrastructure varies widely across Agency Y's office location, including various versions of software and hardware which poses a challenge to developing a standardized implementation plan to deploy the ERP system from Agency Y’s offices.
Agency Y is also challenged by fluctuations in their annual budget which has led them to request a plan that minimizes overall implementation costs.
The information that will feed into the ERP system is stored across multiple, separate systems across the United States.
Question 1
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Your Answer
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A good answer may include some of the following:
Potential employee impact:
Employees will need to devote time to learning how to operate the new ERP system and gathering requirements, which could be spent performing day-to-day responsibilities instead.
Employees may need to participate in user acceptance testing.
Legacy systems, that employees need to access, may be unavailable at select times during the implementation.
Employee acceptance might be influenced by the success of past large-scale changes by Agency Y.
Minimizing negative impact:
Analyze the current organizational structure to better gauge which parts of the organization would benefit from the new system and which parts would be most affected by the implementation
Create an ERP mailbox to streamline feedback and communicate answers to FAQs
Provide sufficient onsite and technical support, especially close to rollout
Create and execute a detailed change management and communications plan
A great answer would also prioritize activities that minimize the impact on employees.
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