Reference no: EM133652402
Assessment Details:
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Case Study- Tate & Lyle Devise a Global IT Strategy
Founded in 1859 in Liverpool as a sugar refiner, today Tate& Lyle is a global provider of specialty food and other ingredients to four markets: food and beverage manufacturers (sweeteners, restaurants, and fibre), paper manufacturers (starches), animal feed producers (cornmeal), and cosmetic manufacturers (cosmetics and creams). It operates over 30 manufacturing facilities in four regions: the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Tate & Lyle grew through acquisitions of many companies in its operating regions throughout its history. The 1970s began diversifying from the sugar business into more specialisedagricultural food products. In 2016 the company had €2.6 billion in sales and €189 million inprofits. Tate & Lyle's 2020 strategic plan is to expand the specialty food segment, broaden thegeographic mix of sales to include the Asia Pacific and Latin America, and generate over €200million in sales from new products. As a multinational agribusiness, the firm faces stiffcompetition from giant global competitors like ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland, and BASF.In the process of growing over many decades, Tate & Lyle had gathered a large collection offinancial accounting systems across four regions and thirty operating facilities.
All thesefinancial systems' accounts were reconciled manually, using spreadsheets produced byindividual units, telephone calls, paper records, fax, and emails to clarify disparities. Eachregion had its own manual processes for reconciling accounts. Reconciliation refers to thebusiness processes used by firms to ensure that recorded expenditures and revenues areaccurately reflected in cash outflow and income statements. The existing manual systemstored records in different locations around the globe, which led to errors and made it difficultto produce monthly and annual financial statements. Senior managers understood that thefirm could not achieve its business strategic objectives without a major rethinking of its basicfinancial accounting systems.
The solution management decided on was to centralize financial accounting at a single location in Lodz, Poland, and to develop an Account Reconciliation and Task Management system. This new system is based on SAP's ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, which combines thousands of general ledger accounts and transactions across the four regions into a single system. SAP's ERP utilizes their HANA relational database software, which stores and retrieves data and provides many other enterprise capabilities, including predictive analytics,
management dashboards, and text search.
Black Line's consulting firm was hired to implement the new system and coordinate with Tate & Lyle financial groups. Implementing the system required two years of intensive planning and the integration of legacy systems into the new single system. The major requirements for the new system included standardized templates, electronic approval of workflows, an easy- to-use interface so managers could quickly obtain the information they needed, as well as the ability to handle multiple currencies, produce basic reports in a timely fashion, and integrate data in the SAP system with non-SAP accounting systems already in use at the regional level. Implementing the new system also gave managers the opportunity to revise and simplify business processes based on industry best practices and to enforce their use across all four regions. The result is a reconciliation system that is accurate, timely, transparent, and able to produce end-of-day results, report on progress towards month-end closing targets, identify outstanding tasks, and communicate with the teams responsible for completing the tasks.
Source: Laudon, KC, & Laudon, JP 2019, Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, Global Edition, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, United Kingdom. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central.
Tasks:
Imagine you work as a consultant for Tate & Lyle. You need to introduce a workflow management system to help improve organisation workflows. In deciding whether this system suits your business needs, you are required to investigate the following through a considerable amount of research, including a literature review and relevant examples.
1. Discuss the case study objectives.
2. Identify the problems Tate & Lyle's new information systems address and recognise the root of those problems? You require to include the role of people, organisationsand technology in these problems.
3. Examine how Tate & Lyle's new systems assist employees in being more productive.
4. Discuss the lessons that can be learned from this case regarding managing information through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
5. Present the workflow management system for Tate & Lyle? Explain the benefits and challenges this system provides to organisations.
6. Determine how an organisation decide to invest in a system such as Tate & Lyle's workflow management system is worthwhile?
7. Identify and discuss the information security systems for protecting business information, such as Tate & Lyle?