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Air Product And Chemicals, Inc.

Case Study: Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
 
Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2
Background 3
Symptoms 3
Symptom 1 – Unable to retain valuable MIS staff 3
Symptom 2 – Low reliability and high maintenance of global networks 4
Symptom 3 – Difficulty on outsourcing IT projects 4
Causes of Symptoms 4
Cause of Symptom 1 4
Cause of Symptom 2 6
Cause of Symptom 3 7
Alternatives 7
Alternative 1 – Build a stronger central MIS team 7
Alternative 2 – Greater IT decentralization 9
Final Recommendation 9


Background
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (APCI) is a mid-sized company in the industrial gases and chemicals industry. In the 1990s, the industry was a mature market, highly competitive worldwide with excess manufacturing capacity and squeezing margins. APCI was the second in gases in the U.S., and the first or second in those international markets where the company chose to compete. APCI was not big enough to gain real economies of scale, but too large to be flexible as a small company. Facing these pressures, the company chose to combine creativity and technology to enable the businesses to compete with large companies.
During the 1990s, APCI had successfully implemented Project ICON to create global networks and Customera to provide competitive advantage through service differentiation. Information technology has moved to the very centre of the company's operations. Outsourcing, client/server architecture and a new MIS department structure are the new challenges in front of the company.

Symptoms

Symptom 1 – Unable to retain valuable MIS staff
APCI has a very high MIS staff turnover rate. The MIS department intends to hire people who have both business and IT backgrounds so that they can create multiply career paths within the company. For example, Project ICON was implemented in 1991; however, in 1994, only about 10% of the people involved in the project remain in this part of the organization. The company is facing...