Vodafone Group PLC is the largest mobile service provider by revenue in the world, with 400 million customers across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the United States. In 2013, it had revenues of $64.6 billion and more than 86,000 employees working in over 30 countries. Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, the business has experienced phenomenal growth, largely by establishing local operating companies that provides products and services to their local markets. As a result, the company was very decentralized, lacking common practices, centralized operations, and data sharing among its various operating companies. Most of Vodafone's mobile subsidiaries operated as independent companies with their own business processes. Vodafone was a network of individual businesses, but it wanted to function more like a single global firm to better deal with competitive pressures. Management called for a major business transformation to make this happen. In 2006, Vodafone's board of directors approved the °Evolution Vodafone" Business Transformation Program' (EVO) designed to refashion Vodafone into a truly global company, with a centralized shared services organization and common worldwide business processes in finances, human resources, and supply chain management for all of the operating companies. (Shared services refers to the consolidation of business operations that are used by multiple parts of the same organization in order to reduce costs and redundancy.) A common SAP ERP system would provide the technology platform for these changes by supporting information-sharing and common business processes that would simplify and speed up work throughout the company. Additional software tools from Informatica, Opentext, Readsoft, Sabrix, Redwood, HP, and Remedy that could integrate with SAP were added to the mix. Vodafone's system turned out to be one of the biggest SAP ERP implementations in the world. How did Vodafone pull it off? First of all, Vodafone's management realized the company lacked the expertise and resources to manage such a complex project entirely on its own. It enlisted the consulting firms Accenture and IBM to provide skills and services that this ambitious project required and which were not available inside the company.
Read the above case study with titled "Vodafone: A Giant Global ERP Implementation" and address the following:
1. Analyze and discuss the central issue(s) faced by Vodafone, including the contributing management and technological factors;
2. Explain why ERP was a necessary information system solution to address the organization's issues;
3. Evaluate the success of Vodafone's implementation plan and provide one suggestion to improve the process;
4. Discuss the value the new ERP system brought to Vodafone as a company; and
5. Summarize your findings in a two to three page paper.