Case Study 18: Honam Petrochemical's Quest for Better Management Reports

20:23 Amrie 0 Comments

INTRODUCTION
  • Honam Petrochemial Corporation (HPC) is located in Seoul, South Korea.
  • HPC manufactures and sells petrochemical products, including synthetic resins; syntethic industrial materials, including ethylene glycol and ethylene oxide.
  • HPC has about 1700 employees and in 2001 revenues closed to USD 7.3 billion and aiming at USD 10 billion by expanding to overseas market.
  • HPC needs more reliable reports to measure management performance in order to increase sales and reduce costs.
  • Executives of HPC do not want different interpretation of report from each department head.
  • HPC executives wanted enterprise-wide data that could be accessed and shared easily across various business units and functions to support the company’s expansion geographically.
  • HPC executives selected SAP Business Objects Dashboards and SAP Object Web Intelligence.
  • Information Systems team focused to get types of reports required by HPC executives (Fact Finding).
  • HPC’s System went live in January 2011, and executives started immediately accessing reports and dashboards on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
  • Systems reduces the time required to collect, process and track the data, executive decision making takes place more rapidly.
  • HPC’s information systems are now ready for global information-sharing as the company expands.

Question 1:
List and describe the information requirements of HPC’s new management system. What problems was the new system designed to solve?
  •  New systems designed to provide a better reporting system. Existing reports are based on individual managers.
  • Requires a better decision support system. HPC's executives prefer to work with updated data (old system provides last quarter's record) and system assist in makin decision.
  • Executives prefer accessed to data via the web and their mobile devices.


Question 2:
To what extent were “people” problems affecting management decision making at HPC? What were some of the management, organization, and technology issues that had to be addressed by the new system? How did the system’s designers make the system more “people-friendly”?
  • Information System's designers discussed about the system requirements in details with executives to find out and study what is the requirement needed.
  • It is very crucial to develop a system that fulfill user's requirements so the system is useful.
  • Individual managers make their own report format and content to make it look good.
  • Management of HPC needs to ensure data are all up to date and can be accessed by authorized different departments.
  • New system should have the technology to empower users to access their data easily and shared.
  • To make the system more friendly, user interface should be carefully designed and simple so user can find it easy to access.
  • Help menu can be easily accessed and after users choose help, system should guide users in solving their problems.

Question 3:
What role did end users play in developing HPC’s new systems? How did the project team make sure users were involved? What would have happened to the project if they had not done this?
  • End users are responsible to assist system analyst in fact finding and system requirements.
  • Project team needs to ensure end users are involved by using fact findings techniques such as interview, questionnaires.
  • Requirements of end users are very crucial in determining the usefulness of a newly developed system.
  • If users are not involved in fact finding progress, or users requirements are not fulfilled, the system will not function as per required and it will end up fail.

Question 4:
What other steps did HPC take to make sure the systems was successful?
  • HPC management requires bench-marking with other companies in the industry in designing and implementing a new system.

Question 5:
What types of system-building methods and tools did HPC use for building its system?
  • System developer user SAP BusinessObject Dashboard - powerful, personalized dashboards based on SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence platform. Business Objects software tools can be used for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis and enterprise information management, and provide self-services access to data from databases and Excel spread-sheets.
  • SAP business objects web intelligence is an ad hoc query, reporting and analysis tools that is used to create queries or use existing reports, format retrieved information, and perform analysis to understand trends and root causes.

Question 6:

What were the benefits of the new system? How did it change the way Honam ran its business? How Successful was this system solution?
  •  Executives can access to latest data via the web and their mobile devices.
  • They are not limited sanitized, staled data in an outdated presentation format.
  • All managers discussions and decisions are based on latest, timely, consisten and accurate information.
  •  Effectively reduce time needed to extract important data, and executive decision making can take place faster.
  • Information systems are readily shared globally.

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