Case Study- An ERP Story: Background (A)
Background
From its formation in 1950, Aux Bons Soins (ABS), a general insurance company in Canada, has consistently grown. Initially, the company provided general insurance services in Quebec province. Consequently, ABS has acquired General Maritime Protection and Western General Insurance operating in Eastern and Western Canada. In a quest to ease management, run the operation of these companies smoothly, and boost sales growth significantly, ABS decided to consolidate the three companies under one legal entity, ABS Canada. To achieve this, the company launched a three-year IT plan to provide the company with an integrated management system for the three companies’ financial management, sales and marketing management, and human resource management. Due to the diversity and complexity of data from the previous systems and processes used by the three companies, ABS company has experienced challenges in developing a unitary information system.
Issues Facing ABS Canada
ABS, General Maritime Protection, and Western General Insurance have been operating with individual information systems and processes from the formation of ABS Canada. Efforts to consolidate the sales and marketing systems have been curtailed by the diversity and high quantity of data in each company’s system. In management, a lot of manual work required to extract information from every company’s information system has also significantly impaired the efforts by ABS Canada to develop a management report that signifies the human resource and financial picture of the new entity. The differences hinder the company’s desire to establish a consistent and easily accessible data system in the definition of data by the three companies. For instance, the client’s identification differs in all of the three companies’ networks. Also, the three companies’ interfaces differ in relation to the application and the original company, thereby curtailing efforts by ABC Canada to develop an information system and process that facilitates employee mobility. The three companies’ applications are incompatible in design and functionality, hindering an information system’s achievement with identical features for all the company’s components. Currently, the companies’ applications are redundant, and their maintenance is non-optimal of various systems that are based on diverse technologies. Besides, the financial and accounting, human resource management, and sales and marketing processes are specific to each company’s operations and correspond to the market they were operating in. These differences have significantly curtailed the management and activity of ABS Canada as a single legal entity.
Recommendations
To develop a reliable unitary system, ABS Canada should standardize and converge the application platforms, converge the master data, and eliminate complexity and duplication. To achieve this, the project manager and his data team should agree on a product classification system on ABS Company’s product qualities, structure, and distribution channel. This classification will form a foundation for matching and linking the product data and thereby provide a guideline on the most effective way to migrate data from the three companies. After classification, the team should select a management system to manage the master data. The system adopted should identify, link, acquire and synchronize the product data from diverse, both internal and external sources. Since the three companies’ data cannot be aggregated in a meaningful way as they are region-specific, the data team should adopt a centralized master data management system that will take the role of a primary platform of record. If, for instance, data on sales by one company was through spreadsheets, a centralized approach should be adopted. The team should also agree on new data governance procedures and policies to instill accuracy in reporting, secure accountability, and ensure transparency and compliance.
The team should also plan for the migration of all the companies’ data. The plan should include a capability and methodology check for the three companies’ resources, hardware, and software while ensuring that the companies’ data is secure. Besides, the plan should provide for a recovery plan and a description of who and when to do what. To reduce errors in data migration, the team should test the results until they achieve an acceptable number of errors, as eliminating all of them may be close to impossible. Besides facilitating the migration of data, the master data system will facilitate the smooth flow of data in the human resource, finance, and sales and marketing departments of the new company.
A master data management system will make it easier for the new company to maintain data governance and regulatory compliance through clear record histories and audit trails.
Conclusion
A significant number of the problems experienced in developing a unitary information system in ABS Canada can be eradicated by adopting a master data management system. ABS Canada, through its project manager, should, therefore, take the master data management system. Besides helping the company develop an information system and processes, this system will be useful for the company is running its operations in the future.
References
Bernier, C., Roy, V., and Brunelle, E. (March 2016). An ERP Story; Background (A). International Journal of Studies in Management. 4(1)