ERP Assignment: Enterprise Resource Planning Within Nike

Question

Task: Prepare a well-researched report on ERP assignment critically discussing about the implementation of ERP system within Nike.

Answer

Introduction
According to the words of Jain, (2019) undertaken herein ERP assignment, enterprise resource planning is considered to be ability for delivering the integrated suite based on the business applications. The ERP tools tend to share data models along with a common process; covering deep and broad end-to-end operational processes; which are known to be found within HR, finance, distribution, service and supply chain as well as manufacturing departments. Thus the present study deals with the implementation of ERP system and its related aspects within the organisation of Nike. Nike was known to be introduced in the year of 1972 by BRS which employed 26,000 staff across the world consisting of revenue of $13.7 billion in the year of 2005, which increased to as much as 39.1 billion US dollars by the year 2019, thus depicting the steady growth curve of the company("Nike News - The official news website for NIKE, Inc.", 2020). The vision of the respective organisation seems to bring innovation and inspiration for each and every athlete across the globe whereas; the mission has been to do every possible thing for expanding human potential.

Influence of Organisational Project Management (OPM3) to identify the problems with implementing the demand planning system As stated by Cowan and Eder (2020), the demand planning system that was considered by the respective organisation to be implemented is known to provide the businesses with proper solutions of forecasting that might help them for preparing regarding the future demand of the customers. Nike also planned to implement the demand planning tools such as working with the incorporation of supply chain and the ERP system as well. This would have helped the company to manage and plan for future production and inventory as well. The respective solutions can help the businesses serve their valuable customers through predicting their needs in the long run. On the other hand, organisational project management seems to be the systematic coordination based on capabilities; structures and practices for achieving a continuous improvement within the performance of the temporary processes.

Nevertheless, as per the views of Fail (2019), OPM3 stands for the organisational project management is a maturity model that tends to define excellence along with the steps to achieve the success and it also helps in recognising that every organisation cannot enjoy excellence through inception. However, for the present case, while implementing the demand planning systems within the concerned organisation, it was found to be complex along with the end users who were also not trained for making use of the system in an effective manner. As per the views of Koch, (2004), this made the company understand that to implement all the tools of demand planning software is not that easy. However, Nike made some adjustments within the implementation and continued for incorporating the ERP system which was found to be smooth. This made Nike to start with this implementation in the year of 2000 at Canadian region and seemed to end up with Latin America and Asia Pacific regions in the year of 2002. This eventually resulted in the implementation of a single instance related to the system along with training the users who were above 6,300.

Three primary reasons for Nike to be successful with ongoing implementation of ERP
As put forward by Chofreh, Goni, Klemeš, Malik & Khan (2020), ERP implementation includes installing software along with moving the financial data across the new system; training the employees for handling the software as well as configuring the processes and the users. Selection of the accurate partner for the implementation of ERP system has been significant for choosing the proper software for the first place. There has been an expected result for the implementation of correct technology of ERP that needs to be streamlined operations along with being easy for using the functionality and a real time view for the business within any of the device as well as the ERP platform which is not secured however adaptable for the needs that are ever changing for the organisation (Ali, van Groenendaal&Weigand, 2020). Thus, Nike planned to implement the ERP system within its demand planning software as in the year of 1998, there have been 27 different along with highly customized systems of order management which were found not to go well within the home office of Beaverton, Oregon. This was the time when Nike was known to decide for implementing and purchasing a single instance of ERP system as well as the customer relationship and supply chain management system for controlling the manufacturing cycle of nine months and consisting of a goal to be cut down for six months.

As opposed by Menon, Muchnick, Butler &Pizur (2019), Nike was found to be successful for its ongoing implementation of ERP due to keeping patience related to the respective incorporation of ERP along with learning through its mistakes which were made earlier. On the other hand, the other reason has been the practice of rigorous training which was considered for the users along with the representatives of customer service. Nevertheless, the last reason has been to carry out the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) for the identification of performance based objectives associated with the project. Hence, these were the three primary reasons for Nike to be successful with the ongoing implementation based on ERP. However there are many other reasons which have helped the company to implement the ERP system successfully such as the organisation was found to take an adequate time for implementation of the ERP project along with learning through the mistakes as well as issues through earlier projects such as demand planning.

Description of phased rollout to be the correct decision for Nike
According to the views of Hasan, Miah, Bao&Hoque (2019), phased rollout is considered to be a software or hardware method of migration which tends to involve an incremental implementation for a new system. This is known to be conducted either through the implementation of a new system within some locations and the business units or rather through the implementation of separate modules based on the systems independently for a successful completion of the respective implementation. It has been evidenced that as everything is not rolled out, an organisation might not have to deal with the issues of potential implementation within the similar time. In addition to that, the information learned through the stages of early implementation are also responsible for being applied for guiding the rest of the process for making fewer issues within the continuation of the implementation. As per the views of Kashyap (2020), the phased rollout is known to allow the users to adjust with the new system in a gradual manner. However, it might be confusing for consisting of user groups to work with various systems along with having the employees to work with elements based on various systems. This type of confusion is also responsible for leading to the issues of data quality.

For the present case of Nike, it was evidenced to implement the demand planning system within the organisation for a lot of reasons that has been mentioned earlier. While the ongoing implementation, it has been seen that there were a smaller number of users as compared with the ERP system and have been thought to be easy to implement. Nevertheless, as stated by Goldston, (2019), this was turned out to be the case, while the system went live, there came to be certain problems associated with the response time; software as well as data. Furthermore, training was also not addressed which, in turn, caused the end users for making use of the systems in an effective manner. The single instance of ERP system along with the implementation of supply chain were found to be planned differently through the demand planning system and have been known as a phased rollout within a few years.

This made the implementation of the ERP system go much smoother. The option of phased rollout has been suitable for the organisation for being executed as the respective organisation by its earlier experiences based on the implementation of demand planning system, tend to perceive the complexity for ERP project. This allowed the organisation for deciding whether it requires any partner from outside regarding the implementation of support related to its capabilities and skills as well. As evidenced by Chang and Hsu (2019), this made the company take an informed decision along with requiring a longer time for the respective implementation of phased rollout. Hence, throughout the entire process, the project team of Nike was found to learn through its mistakes along with making the project achieve the business objectives as well.

Conclusion
To conclude, the above discussion has been conducted over the case study of Nike and its implementation of ERP system. The all over business plan along with the complex implementation of systems within the respective organisation has been considered in the present study. The goals of the respective business have also been achieved with the successful implementation of ERP system. However, the company was found to learn from its earlier experience and this made the organisation increase its training for the respective implementation of ERP. Hence, the business process re-engineering has been used in an effective way for clarification of the performance based goals.

References
Ali, I., van Groenendaal, W. J. H., &Weigand, H. (2020). Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Implementation and Firm Performance: An Empirical Study. Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Management, 5(1).

Chang, Y. W., & Hsu, P. Y. (2019). An empirical investigation of organizations’ switching intention to cloud enterprise resource planning: a cost-benefit perspective. Information Development, 35(2), 290-302.
Chofreh, A. G., Goni, F. A., Klemeš, J. J., Malik, M. N., & Khan, H. H. (2020). Development of guidelines for the implementation of sustainable enterprise resource planning systems. Journal of Cleaner Production, 244, 118655.
Cowan, E. J., & Eder, L. B. (2020). The transformation of AT&T’s enterprise network systems group to Avaya: enabling the virtual corporation through reengineering and enterprise resource planning.ERP assignment Journal of Information Systems Education, 14(3), 15.

Fail, W. T. E. (2019). Enterprise resource planning.
Goldston, J. (2019). A Qualitative Study of Risk Mitigation in Enterprise Resource Planning Implementations. GSJ, 7(12).
Hasan, N., Miah, S. J., Bao, Y., &Hoque, M. R. (2019). Factors affecting post-implementation success of enterprise resource planning systems: a perspective of business process performance. Enterprise Information Systems, 13(9), 1217-1244.

Jain, M. (2019). U.S. Patent No. 10,489,758. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Kashyap, R. (2020). Security Framework for Enterprise Resource Planning.In Metrics and Models for Evaluating the Quality and Effectiveness of ERP Software (pp. 84-118).IGI Global. Koch, C. (December 7, 2004). Nike Rebounds. CIO Australia’s magazine for executives

Menon, S. A., Muchnick, M., Butler, C., &Pizur, T. (2019). Critical challenges in enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. International Journal of Business and Management, 14(7), 54-69.

Nike News - The official news website for NIKE, Inc. (2020). Retrieved 29 March 2020, from https://news.nike.com