First off I would like to thank you for having the opportunity to discuss with you some of the issues your company is dealing with at this time. In this memo I hope to highlight certain issues pertaining to the cutover that was called “Enterprise 21”. There was an enormous amount of information that needed to be incorporated together in an enterprise resource planning endeavor. This cutover caused many issues at your company from logistics to customer satisfaction. With this memo I hope to convey a detailed assessment to prevent this from happening again.

As the year 2000 was approaching Hershey’s saw that there was a need to update their information technology. Hershey was similar to other food distributors and did not spend much more than was needed on their information technology. As the year 2000 was impending Hershey saw the need to replace there current legacy system for a new ERP system that would integrate all areas of Hershey’s. Your vice president of information systems Rick Bentz began to modernize and update software and hardware in the early months of 1996. This project was named “Enterprise 21”. The goals of this project were to upgrade and standardizing the company's hardware, and moving from a mainframe-based network to a client-server environment. Bentz noted benchmark studies that show Hershey’s trailed industry peers spending on information technology. Bentz also noted that Hershey’s needed to be able to share its data more efficiently.

Hershey's information systems management set the goal a move to an ERP system using software from SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany. SAP was to be complemented with software from Manugistics Group Inc. of Rockville, Maryland. Manugistics would support production forecasting and scheduling, as well as transportation management. In addition, the company decided to install software from Siebel Systems Inc. of San