Unit 4 IP
G**** N*******
American Intercontinental University

This unit’s case studies seemed to focus a great deal on growth of production and overall company growth. In the following pages will be a basic overview of the case study answers from the excerpts. All of the readings contained a tremendous amount of useful knowledge. The excerpts: Denver Goes Alfresco, Firewire Surfboards Lights Up with CAD, Colgate-Palmolive keeps managers smiling with executive dashboards, will be analyzed and discussed as listed.
In the first excerpt, Denver Goes Alfresco we go over a major growing point in Denver’s economy, city-state government, public relations and community involvement. These major changes, once started, took 15 month period of 6-12 week cycles. Before every implementing this project The city-government and its various agencies were in a blinded state of turmoil. They were have so many issues with technological communication that the only option was change!
So change they made by implementing a single centralized IT group whose sole purpose was to bring the city-government out of the ashes. This of course meant saying farewell to the existing 14 management systems, saving costs in doing so anyway. The new system, the enterprise content management (ECM) system had to fill 3 major roles records, security, and finally communication.
The ECM chosen blew its competitor away with a million dollar a year in potential savings. That and its ability to accommodate the cities needs and much more but would pay for itself in less than two years. They would soon link with peoplesoft and ESB(oracle enterprise service bus) to better serve all denvers city-government employees and the citizens as well. Its main benefit to the citizens was through ECB where when the ECM lynced with it they citizens could report crimes via the World Wide Web.
The next company we will be looking into is one of the leaders in the surf board design and production industry. Firewire in and article titled, Firewire Surfboards Lights Up With CAD, THEY DISCUSS THEIR PATENTED LIGHT WEIGHT BOARDS AND THEIR DESIGN IT YOUR SELF SOFTWARE. With their brilliant imaginations and approach its no woder they have risen to fame. Nev Hyman, of Australia, has been constructing surf boards for 35 years. Later in 2005 in Carlsbad, California, Nev teamed up with Mark Price and a group of longtime surfing friends to form Firewire Surfboards. Firewire is the company who fathered the first major change in surfing history. Instead of the traditional polyurethane resin and foam they are using expanded polystyrene foam and epoxy resin. Hyman’s marketing effect here is that the overall board will more flexible and maneuverable. This they hope would attract the best of the best in the surf world while setting them apart from their competitors. Another selling point is that the EPS only emits two percent of harmful material that the traditional boards do. Not to mention Firewire has earned rewards both acclaim and international for the recycling of excess EPS. In our last assigned reading we come across an article about Colgate-Palmolive entitled, Colgate-Palmolive Keeps Managers Smiling with Executive Dashboards, where the company executives have given us some insight on what has led to them being the second largest producer of consumer products in the world. Having your product marketed in 200+ countries is kind of a big deal! The secret to Colgate’s constant growth was having the ability to its brands offshore and overseas. Of course this all changes from easy to requiring more planning as soon as it all hit big. In the early 90s Colgate was running five ERP systems all different to serve different world regions. Over time the data began changing so much on a corporate level at home base and that being developed overseas. This was not what Colgate wanted. They wanted a more usable data than simply what you would see on a receipt and wanted all the company’s separate entities to run off, if not the exact same, a variation of the same data. This brought about the creation of the SAP NetWeaver business warehouse with SAP’s analytical, reporting and data housing solution. All the systems would feed their data into this one central point, where it would be formatted for enterprise-wide analysis. This of course meant new employees, more precisely, of three different groups. Senior managers who prepared daily HTML table’s shows finances and operations numbers compared to the previous quarter. Power users to report and analyze. Also we have casual users who did all the snipping, formatting, and editing. After a specialized training with the new system Colgate was able to get real data from the system faster and simpler as needed and production values all-around keep growing. As I have gone over some of the finer points of these three companies hearing how they started and leaning what makes them tick. I have come to the conclusion that in today’s world our reliance on computers and software is what has led to companies like this, business executives and corporate CEO’s reach the levels of hierarchy not by standing still but instead going the same pace, if not faster, as the rest of the world and more importantly technology. If we, the business CEO’s of tomorrow, learn from and analyze these Corporate great of today with the right amount of time we all will have our chance at big seat of a major corporation or even of our own.

References