Reducing enterprise IT fragmentation through standard metrics and decision tools : a case study in the aerospace and defense industry

Abstract

Over the last several decades, manufacturing companies around the world have embraced new and powerful business tools made possible with Information Technology. Major investments are frequently made in enterprise-wide systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions to take advantage of cost saving opportunities. While promising in concept, system implementations can grow to be expensive and complicated during execution, commonly resulting in project de-scoping and sacrifices in functionality and integration. If not carefully managed, this can ultimately lead to an environment of costly custom workaround solutions for years to follow, subverting the central goal of the original investment. This thesis presents a case study examining Raytheon's initiative to launch an enterprise ERP system (SAP PRISM) in an effort to standardize and modernize supply chain operations. Within the SAP implementation, the repair and retrofit, or depot, business had major integration components de-scoped due to cost constraints. As a result numerous systems have been developed to manage the business, leading to difficulties in process alignment across manufacturing programs. This work introduces a pilot project with the objective of re-aligning business processes by delivering a portal of common metrics and decision tools to the manufacturing and operations community. With the common portal, the user community gains access to existing centralized data, reducing the need for isolated application development and enabling richer capability.