Riordan Manufacturing Assessment

Riordan Manufacturing Assessment

In order for a company to stay competitive a company must stay current with changing business systems and technologies. The following assessment is being done in order to find which systems and technologies, if any, need to be updated or changed. This will help the Riordan Company continue the long standing commitment to excellence that the company is known for.

Finance and Accounting is one of the most important departments in the company. For this reason the systems that work for and along with this department should always be as current as they can be. Currently, Riordan Manufacturing has three plants in different states and a joint venture in China. The corporate office which is located in California receives reports from the Michigan and Georgia departments as well as the department in China.

When the Michigan and Georgia plants were acquired the systems of each plan were not addressed so each plant is running different systems. Some data is sent to the corporate office as data files, some information is sent in as a hard copy form, and some data files need to be converted in order to be used. For this reason the amount of time that the corporate office spends monthly on analyzing and consolidating information from the two plants is enormous and costly to the company.

The California plant has a license for fully integrated ERP systems in place but the license does not cover application source code. The Michigan plant has vendor developed applications and source code but the vendor is now out of business. The Georgia plant has vendor developed applications and source code through a different vendor that is still in business. Each system is run on different technologies in each plant and only the corporate office has a backup system in place.

In order to bring the Financial and Accounting department current and compatible with each other, a series of changes should be made. First a common system needs to be put into place for each plant. Since the Georgia plant already has vendor application and source code support, this system should be copied at the other two plants. The systems can be modified to accommodate the needs of each site while making the entire network a single system. The same equipment that is being used at the Georgia plant should also be installed at the other plants as well. This will insure that the system will be compatible