This case study outlines an ERP system launched by management to increase business through online. The purpose of the study is threefold. First, the history of the business. Second, the importance of business continuity. Lastly, an overview of efforts by management to create a strategy for implementing ERP

Please see the below possible questions.

1) Scale the organization to its size for implementing an ERP.

2) ERP on the cloud, how effective in this business?

3) Why ERP has been failed, elaborate main points?

4) The organizations own Accounts Payables system creates a negative impact to the ERP, do you think?

5) How we overcome the major issues identified?

Trendy House is a major home retail chain, with 24 stores across Queensland. Trendy House was founded in 1995 by Jon Greenman, initially as a furniture manufacturer. The company grew quickly, first developing it own retail outlets to sell its products, and later developing these outlets into the home retail stores they are today: selling a much wider range of large furniture, decoration materials as well as smaller homewares from other manufacturers. However, sales of these products have not done as well as expected and Jon believes this is due to the online competition Early in 2015, Jon decided to try and sell his products online, however, after a few months of trading online Jon decided to shut down online orders. In addition to being hacked, the system was unable to handle the additional traffic to the website. The system manages individual software for each of the different departments There is quite a bit of redundant data, which has made online trading difficult. After shutting down online ordering, Jon was determined to get Trendy House's systems sorted. Early in 2016, Jon and a number of the department heads met to discuss the future of Trendy House and the need to implement a new system, especially if the wanted to go online. After several months of discussions and planning, the decision was made in September 2016 to purchase an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It is now 25 April 2017 and Trendy House's senior management team is meeting to discuss the organisation's recent attempt to implement an ERP. James Harding, the internal) project manager, provided the following report to the meeting As you know, last September we purchased an ERP system from Absolute Software. Since that time we have been working to implement the system, including integrating it with our existing sales recording software after the decision was taken not to implement Absolute's sales module in the stores. We also developed our own new accounts payable module to reflect our unique procurement methods, and integrated that with Absolute's software. Most of that integration work was done by the Trendy House's limited IT staff. Unfortunately, although they did their best, they lacked the system development skills to determine how best to handle the implementation and went straight to building what they thought would work. They also kept most of what they were doing to themselves and as a result most of the staff where unaware of what was happening On Monday 11 April 2017, we went live with our direct conversion to the new ERP system. However difficulties quickly became apparent. For a start, the location of the server was not ideal. It was placed in the printer room next to the main office. Although it was a convenient spot it was right next to all the filing cabinets and the room got quite crowded during busy periods with lots of people going in and out. It also got really hot, as there was no air-conditioning vent. In terms of running, the system was extremely slow, and there were many difficulties relating specifically to the sales and accounts payable modules. The lack of pre-testing by the IT aff caused a number of issues and resulted in an overwhelming amount of queries and complaints from staff The major issues identified were Sales-Significant differences in reconciliations between sales reported in the system and the actual daily records from stores. Intermittent system downtime leading stores to resort to manual sales processing 2. Accounts Payable Transactions were identified in the accounts payable module, specifically in the supplier data, made by unauthorised staff, with the built-in authentication controls not effective. As a result, the decision was taken on Monday 18 April, 2017 to revert to our previous systems. This required. the reposting of all of the previous week's transactions into those systems attempting to ensure that all transactions are now posted, properly authorised and not duplicated. However, given the difficulties experienced it is b no means certain that we can achieve that. We will likely have a number of mistake but fortunately, with only a week's trading, it will only cause minor issues Going forward, we want to examine what went wrong with this implementation, amend the ne aim to implement the system later this year, in September. Ultimately it is Jon's goal to go onlin e, and we need to be sure the new system can handle it. Mike Smyth, head of procurement, responded that "the disruption to the business because of this implementation has been immense We've been able to go back to our previous systems and after this misadventure I just don't see any reason to try to implement an ERP again. I think we should stick to what we know