Reference no: EM132991869

A Vancouver company that makes gourmet crackers using many ingredients such as sunflower seeds. The company's Vice President of Operations had difficulty finding information such as: the total quantity of seeds purchased during the year the suppliers from which seeds had been purchased; how many orders were placed.

He discovered that employees in the manufacturing operations area placed orders in various ways, such as: using a purchasing system; using spreadsheets; using manual approaches (telephone and paper invoices). Once the purchasing information was collected from the various systems he learned that the total amount was over 100,000 pounds of sunflower seeds. The seeds had been purchased from many different suppliers, and individual orders tended to be small.

Part A: Briefly explain how does the concept of functional silos relate to this problem?

Part B: If the company adopts an ERP approach to solving this problem, will the functional systems continue to be useful? Briefly explain why or why not.