Bombardier Case Study Summary

Answer 1: below are the reasons why Bombarding opted for EIP systems
• Bombardier implemented an acquisition strategy to grow their business. With this strategy organization has faced many challenges as during this acquisition they inherited the data, processes and systems of each company which created inefficiency systems that didn’t communicate with each other. Below are the problems created from this inefficiency
o Lack of integration between legacy systems (Textbook Silo Organization)
o Low visibility of Inventory
o Problems related to operations: process delays, sequential activities, supplier proliferation, and price inconsistency.
• Wanted to provide faster product to market times
• Organization has faced more competition with other

organization, so it felt that it gain competitive advantage by implementing ERP systems.
• To implement one integrated organization (One company culture)
Answer 2: The mentioned 3 processes are very important in achieving successful ERP implementation.
Creating a vision: Creating a vision is the most important task in any ERP implementation projects, because without a vision a project might end up in creating software which doesn’t align with organizations goals. Also including all functional area in the creating a vision is important as their functional areas visions should also align with complete organizations vision. Bombardier has taken below steps to address vision issue.
1) Establishing series of functional councils in the early in the project which contains senior employees from each functional department. 2) Conducted visioning workspaces and creating a visioning document that defines a model organization and key performance indicators to successfully run the business. 3) Communicating overall vision of the project to all employees and giving responsibility to all level employees to pass the project vision to their staff.
Project Team: A good project team is also necessary along with a good vision to implement software. Organization will face lot of problems if project team doesn’t have good knowledge on the organizations business. This was also one of the reasons why first Bombardier first ERP implementation was failed. Bombardier has taken below steps to address project team related issues.
1) Project team requested the business to provide its most experienced employees to involve in the project team. 2) These employees are selected from different functional teams as they will represent their function point of view and also to provide their hands experience in the business. 3) Ratio of employees to consultants is changed from 1:10 to 10:1
Blueprint: The main purpose of this blueprint is to provide detailed design of the system that would align with organization requirements.

Project team is responsible for creating this blue print and this should get approval by relevant functional councils. If organization starts implementing ERP without blueprint their might be a chance that it misses potential integration issues that will cause complete system failure. Bombardier has taken below steps to address this issue but couldn’t figure it out completely.
1) An integration team was formed to validate the design created by project team. 2) More specific design issues were dealt with in design workshops that were held during the design phase.
Answer 3: What Approach: Bombardier has implemented “Phased Implementation” strategy to deploy ERP system.
Why: The main reason for Bombardier to choose this option is that this will allow them to have necessary business evolution and also perfect roll-out process, best practices, techniques, and tools, prior to subsequent roll-out activities.
Do I agree? : Yes, I agree with this approach, as Bombardier has below advantages with it.
1) Bombardier can gain knowledge and experience during this first phase implementation which can be used for subsequent phases. 2) Project implementation team can focus on one part of the system or selected group of users. 3) There will less number of users that needs to be prepared for this

change.
What was the roll of training? Training has played significance roll in the ERP implementation. This gave some insight about how the system works and how it is going to affect their daily work process. Bombardier users have no idea how ERP systems works, so it would have been very difficult if they go live without training as it creates chaos and gives effect on the business. Even though they did not get a clear idea on what exactly new system does, they got some trainers, training sessions and e-learning modules to understand key functionalities of new system which made them comfortable with it.
Answer 4: Yes, Bombardier faced several issues after going live.

• Users from different functions complained that there were significant delays in getting answers to their questions.
o Bombardier tried to solve this problem by making sure that at least one power user will available on-site to resolve queries.
• There was a procurement problem where ERP system was sending faxes to suppliers every MRP engine update.
o This problem has been solved by holding purchase orders in a pool and sending them in built at once A week
• Finance team also faced issues as full general ledger has not implemented in SAP.
o Finance has continued to use legacy system to maintain general ledger. This SAP system integration made employees to enter all required information in the correct manner, so that they don’t have to correct the mistakes manually.
• Initially method group employees got frustrated by the process of updating Master Data Group for making updated to bill of materials.
o It took some time for Methods employees to understand what information the newly formed Master Data group required from

them.
Answer 5:
Yes, Bombardier had successfully implemented complex ERP system without affecting the current system process. Less than one year after the go live the first phase of the implementation had already contributed to a reduction in inventories of $1.2 billion. This was one of the great achievements in an industry that has experienced several failures.