Green Forrest Paper Company (GFPC) Located in the midwestern area of the U.S, has grown into a global firm with more than 1,800 employees and an annual turnover of US $700 million. Green Forrest has been able to do this through continuous improvement on the quality of products to optimize their business processes. However, the demand for the firm’s product lines has dramatically increased all of over the world causing GFPC to set up a manufacturing, branch’s in Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, and Portugal to, create a strategic alignment, potential benefits, and reduce costs.
1) Identify the SDLC stage where there are problems:
In the first Stage systems of the SDLC, GFPC evaluated the existing IT systems, found that the data in the reports were out-of-date and “sanitized,” needed to implement a data warehouse system (SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse), and customized software to facilitate the growth of the company into Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, and Portugal. Data warehouses incorporate multiple databases into a single repository for executives to accurately complete and report information on a timely fashion.
However in the second Stage of the SDLC, GFPC occurred the most problems. The system analysis stage evaluates proposed information systems and collects required information from end users, managers, customers, and business through interviews, questionnaires and document analysis so executives gain a better understanding how the organization should operate.
Finally in the fourth stage of the SDLC, the implementation and operation of the new systems involved problems in the software programming and testing and training and system conversion.
2) Identify the problems: In order for GFPC to reduce costs (goal), GFPC implemented SAP’s data warehouse software and data mining solution with BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP Web Intelligence Version 2.0 to replace out-of-date and “sanitized” reports. These systems allowed end users to select data from queries about the purchases of raw materials to the invoicing of the final product. However in the production phase of these systems end users experienced, “buggy reports on data” through beta and alpha tests. The cause of this was the extract/transform/loan stage that needed to be executed before the testing phase on the multiple queries that occurred. The second problem is instead of the executives of GFPC trusting the system analysis and implementing the system design, executives spent more time questioning the accuracy, completeness, and efficiency of the data being reported.
3) What is the IT project team doing right or doing wrong? If they are doing something right, explain why it is right and if they are