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Cis 319/ Riordan Manufacturing

Riordan Manufacturing
IT Proposal & Assessment Summary

According to Riordan’s Capital Budget Executive Summary for
Fiscal year ending 2005, the consensus of Riordan’s executive management is that the F&A, Manufacturing (ERP), and the Sales Performance and Management (CRM) applications and processes are in disarray, and a serious risk to the business. The infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled in all categories with specific emphasis in application software, databases, and hardware.

The current state of the IT infrastructure includes challenges in coordinating sales, services, resource planning, and financial accounting with the currently deployed aging, incompatible, IT systems to run the core business. The legacy applications and the associated hardware were not designed initially to work together seamlessly, and as a result, are becoming very expensive to maintain and less reliable. There are several internal business processes that still include heavy manual intervention and are not automated. There are also handwritten data records inputted in multiple areas through manual data entry. This practice creates an unacceptable level of risk to the business including noncompliance to regulatory mandates.

It is proposed by our team that an update in processes and technology will result in significant cost savings. We will attempt to leverage the current infrastructure in certain areas wherever possible to limit both capital and operating expenditures. This assessment also does not take into consideration any potential risks associated with costs in training employees in new applications, professional services with regards to implementation, knowledge transfer, and ongoing ‘care and feeding’ of new applications. We will however, be able to better indentify underutilized assets during the first phases of implementation planning with the customer. Here are our findings and recommendations to date.
Databases
Riordan has major issues and...