Case Study Report: Assignment requirements
You need to form into groups of 3 students to work on the case study, “Harley-Davidson: Enterprise Software Selection” taken from Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases (sixth edition) by Applegate, Austin and McFarlan (2002). The case study document is provided in a separate pdf document. You are required to write a report that covers the following aspects.
- Provide an analysis of the business (eg. Domestic and international competitions, customer base and company finance etc) and technical environment (eg. IT infrastructure, internal IT skills and support structure etc) of Harley-Davidson when it started its Supply Chain Management System (SMS) project.
- With reference to the case information, discuss the drivers or the reasons AND the challenges for formulating the Supply Management Strategy in Harley-Davidson in late 1990s.
- Discuss with some details from the case study the strategic approach Harley-Davidson took towards implementing the ERP system, including but not limited to business process mapping (“As Is” vs “To Be”), project team and technology rationalization, supplier selection process etc. Give your critique of the approach.
- Before implementing SMS, Berryman believed that the key of a successful SMS strategy is “building a depth of understanding around the strategy”. With some research give a summary of the critical success factors for ERP implementations. Site examples from the Harley-Davidson case study where relevant.
Your report should be up to 2,000 words in length (excluding the counting of Table of Content, Table of Figures, References ) and must be submitted via MyLO by the due date. The Discipline’s Late Assessments policy (available from https://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1246706/ICT_LateAssignment_ExtensionPolicy.pdf ) describes the penalties for late submission and also explains what to do if you are unable to hand in your assignment on time for genuine reasons, such as illness.
Appendix A of this document will outline the marking criteria for this report.
Marks will be allocated for the quality of content, evidence of research, general organisation and flow of the report, including use of appropriate headings and sub-headings, effective use of diagrams, bullet points, tables etc. Grammar, spelling and writing style are also significant.
Your business report must contain an executive summary, table of content, introduction, body of report with meaningful headings and subheadings, a conclusion and references.
Introduction
Introduce your report, and state its purpose and focus. Highlight why the topic is important. Give an outline of the content / organisation of the remainder of the report, and summarise your recommendations.
Body: Research and Discussion
This is the ‘heart’ of your report and should provide evidence of careful and thorough research. You need to show that you have: read widely around the topics identified in ‘Requirements for Your Report’ (together with any areas you uncover during your literature review); analysed your reading effectively; presented your findings in a logical manner; identified the major factors associated with your topic; and drawn logical and useful conclusions (if applicable) from your analysis.
You can consider to have 4 sections in this report with each section covering one bullet point in the Assignment Requirements above.
Do remember to give each section a short meaningful Subtitle rather than using a long sentence as a subtitle. For example, assuming you make your first section as Introduction, you could structure your answer to bullet point 1 as the following:
- Business and technical environment for SMS
2.1 business environment for SMS
2.2 technical environment for SMS
Conclusion
In your conclusion section you have two tasks: to summarise your arguments and to identify interesting, worrying or critical lessons learned from your analysis and discussion. It can be viewed as a ‘so what?’ section of a report, because it allows you to show the reader why it’s been worth your while to undertake the research.
Solution
Enterprise Software Selection
1.0 Introduction
Harley-Davidson motorcycles can be described as legendary products, as presented in the case study. The firm enjoys a pool of loyal clients and employees, guaranteeing the continuance of its profitability and going concern status for the foreseeable future. However, the entity faced turbulent times in the 1980s and was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the management team was able to make a turnaround and mold the company to be the financially stable institution it is today. Employees were the main stakeholders who facilitated the turnaround from imminent collapse to a thriving entity. Looking into this report, there is an analysis of the business in terms of international and domestic competition, corporate financial position, and customer base. At the same time, there is a reflection into the technical environment in terms of information technology infrastructure as of when the company commenced the supply chain management system project. The drivers and reasons, as well as challenges for developing the supply management strategy, are discussed in the report. Additionally, there is reflection into the strategic approach assumed in the implementation of the ERP system in the company as well as success factors of the same process.
2.0 Business analysis
As per the case study, Harley-Davidson was the largest motorcycle producer in the United States but still had to face competition from other formidable rivals from Japan. Within the country, the company faced minimal rivalry in the industry because………………………………………………….To access the rest of the solution for $10, please click on the purchase button.
