The Richard Ivey School of Business had recently introduced a wireless network and required all students to purchase laptops and network cards. After a year of use, the faculty decided to restrict laptop usage in class by disallowing the use of network cards. They felt the students were using the network cards for unrelated activities in class and that this was compromising the learning process. Reaction from the students was mixed, with some students .....more

Over the past 15 years SAP AG has become the fourth largest independent software company in the world. This ranking was achieved largely by word of mouth and with very little advertising. A brief history and update on SAP up to 1998 is provided in this note. It includes short descriptions of the software, sales, market, customers - globally and in Canada, SAPs partners, etc. The purpose is to introduce the concept of enterprise wide systems and enterprise .....more

The objective of this case is to illustrate the complexity of a large information technology project. The case begins when the Provincial Power Corporation and PricewaterhouseCoopers agree to do a SAP implementation project. The benefits of the system to the Provincial Power Corporation are discussed, as well as the strengths, weaknesses and history of SAP IS-U/CCS (SAP Industry Specific-Utilities/Customer Care & Service). The key success factors .....more

The project manager of an SAP Industry Specific Utilities/Customer Care and Service (IS-U/CSS) project must help his client, a utilities company, decide on the future of the project. The major project issues included time pressures, budget constraints, management issues, technical problems and staff motivation concerns. The project was at a point of no return, and he had to recommend whether the project continue on schedule, be delayed or be canc .....more

Xerox Hong Kong had implemented two IT projects. Critical Business Information was being rolled out by the sales and marketing department for sales activity management. While the director of office systems operations was encouraged by the improvement in the quality of information and its usefulness in planning and reporting sales activities, he also realized that significant effort would be required for Xerox Hong Kong to fully embrace the digital .....more

The controller of AMP of Canada learned that her existing transactional processing system was not year 2000 compliant. She must choose between three alternatives: upgrading the existing transactional processing system, implementing a customized software package that many AMP companies already used, or implementing SAP. She knew that Canadian management preferred to implement the very popular SAP system, but her information systems manager did not .....more

The second of the AMP of Canada case series (see the (A) case, 9A99E030 and the (C) case, 9A99E032), this case describes the decision to implement SAP, the project's history, and culminates with the final decision about whether to go live. Not all functionality is complete, but some may be completed before the go live on October 5, 1998, and some may not be immediately required to run the business. With only two weeks left, the project team is .....more

The third in the AMP of Canada case series (see the (A) case, 9A99E030 and the (B) case, 9A99E031), this case describes events immediately after the (B) case. Although the project is officially a success, the organization has changed dramatically since the project began. The two key questions are revisiting the same decisions in cases (A) and (B): should the project have gone live, and was it the right decision to implement SAP.

Lipton Canada was replacing a highly-tailored, 15-year-old information system with SAP R/3 because the old system was not Y2K compliant. The project leader encountered difficulties configuring SAP to handle the particular way the company managed trade spending, which was how Lipton supported cooperative promotional work with its customers. To date, it had proved impossible to configure SAP to emulate this key process exactly. Three options were under .....more

The sales director of Xerox (Hong Kong) has a vision to transform sales force management processes which would require radical changes to both the organization and the information technology infrastructure. The design includes a company-wide database to be available to the sales force by remote access through Intranet/Internet. From this database the sales force could manage their territory using notebook computers while travelling, working at client .....more