Nibco's Big Bang

NIBCO’s “Big Bang”: SAP Implementation In 1994, after a significant strategic planning effort took place, NIBCO Inc., decided to implement a plan to, “Go Live” with a new SAP program. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) The reasons behind NIBCO’s decision to implement and ERP System are those that are familiar to other companies who have made the same decision. One of the key conclusions from the strategic planning that led to the ERP implementation was that the organization could not prosper with its current information systems. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) They systems that they were currently using had evolved into a patchwork of legacy systems and reporting tools that could not talk to each other. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) The lack of systems communications were due to the fact that over the years, NIBCO had a manufacturing package that ran on Hewlett Packard and an accounting system that ran on IBM and a distribution package that was repackaged to run on IBM. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012)The differences in the systems over the years led to lack of digital communication between the systems. Not only were the systems not communicating with each other, there was also concerns about being able to grow the company and become more global without an integrated information capability. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) Another reason why NIBCO decided to implement a SAP system was because the systems development staff spent most of their time building custom interfaces between the systems, trying to resolve the disconnects between them. The information systems people were not particularly happy a lot because the systems would blow up on regular bases due to the ad hoc changes that were often made. (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) Even though there were several different legitimate reasons for NIBCO to implement a SAP system,

References: (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins. 2012) Managing Information Technology, (7th ed.) PearsonHall Education, Inc.