ERP System Implementation At A Small Engineering Company: Size Does Matter

This case regards a company pseudonymously referred to as Johnson Precision Instruments, Inc, that, faced with Y2K compliance, decided to deal with it by adopting Oracle’s ERP solution, Oracle Applications. As recently as the mid to late nineteen eighties, traditional business applications comprising an organization's information infrastructure used data that either resided in proprietary file structures or was easily represented by the relational database model, in either event resulting in an ever proliferating set of non-integrated, heterogeneous systems. In today’s business climate, access to information is key to competitive advantage, but both data and IT architectures have become increasingly complex, so a single system model is currently deemed desirable to reduce or eliminate the deleterious effects associated with the proliferation phenomenon. This single system model (that would serendipitously solve as Johnson Precision Instruments, Inc.'s (JPII) Y2K problem as well) is typically embodied in the implementation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) process, but this solution carries it's own costs and risks as this case makes clear.