SUCCESSFUL PLANNING IN NIKE

Running head: SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note:

1SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
Table of Contents
Answer 1....................................................................................................................................2
Answer 2....................................................................................................................................4
Answer 3....................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

2SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
Answer 1
The organization of Nike started as Blur Ribbon Sports in the year 1964 by the
founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight in Oregon of Beaverton. It was re-named as Nike in
1972 and employed 26000 members in all its branches worldwide with numerous factory
stores, women stores, administrative and sales offices. During the 1970’s the company grew
internationally and incorporated 27 order management systems that were highly customized,
yet they did not communicate efficiently with the head office at Beaverton. Hence, the
organization of Nike decided to implement a single Enterprise Resource Planning system
(ERP) and supply chain system to become aware of all the processes and achieve the data
updates from all the departments. However, the company planned to implement a demand
planning system prior to ERP implementation for an experimental purpose.
The demand planning system incorporated by Nike before implementing the ERP was
an utter failure in various aspects. The executives of the organization thought that the users in
demand planning system were less in number than the ERP system users and hence it will be
easy for the implementation purpose. However, the system did not turn out to be a successful
scenario in the company. After the execution of demand planning system, when it went live
amongst the employees, software related problems occurred at a huge rate. It was complex in
its features and took ample amount of time to response. The data generated from the software
also had issues in it and were not much helpful to the organization. Furthermore, the
employees in the company had neither the knowledge nor the skill to use the software of the
system of demand planning. Even, the testing of the system was not planned in advance that
will be able to check the issues with interfaces of legacy system.
Hence, to make this project a successful venture, the manufacturing organization
should have incorporated the maturity model of Organizational Project Management to

3SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
identify the issues in the system of demand planning. OPM3 is a structural and systematic
framework of projects and portfolios aligns with the goals of a particular organization and
effectively monitors all aspects of a business (Anantatmula and Rad 2018). These aspects
include developing a business, engineering of systems, managing projects, associated risks
and supervision of IT and personnel systems. By following the OPM3 cycle consisting of
three elements- knowledge, improvement and assessment, Nike could have been successful
implementing the demand planning system.
 The knowledge element of OPM3 could have provided Nike with information about
the relevant best practices that would have been helpful to understand the strategic
objectives of the company. The online tool of OPM3 is also capable of incorporating
detailed directories comprising of a database of the best practices for a considerate
understanding (Kerzner 2019).
 The assessment element of OPM3 comprises of a high-level assessment and a
comprehensive assessment. The high-level assessment could have helped Nike to
determine the scope of improvement with demand planning system and the
comprehensive assessment evaluates the capabilities of these improvement tools
regarding the best practices (Kostalova and Tetrevova 2018). Thus, by this assessment
tool, Nike could have assessed the budget and software related issues before
implanting the system.
 The improvement element of OPM3 completely focuses on the enhancements that can
be made in an organizational project. Hence, Nike could have used it to overcome the
issues related to software. It could have helped Nike to incorporate a training
procedure for the employees (Seelhofer and Graf 2018). Improvement could have
been done on the cost of the system too. Thus, after the implementation of all these

4SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
elements in Nike, the company should have repeated all the processes for an effective
outcome.
Answer 2
Although Nike was failure in implementing the demand planning system, after its
phased rolled out for quite a few years, Nike was successful in its ERP venture and
implementation of supply chain system. The decision for ERP implementation in Nike was
because the lack in communication from the 27 other departments of order management
systems. Since, these departments were not communicating well, the home office of the
organization in Beaverton were not being aware of the functional processes of these
departments. Moreover, the headquarters were also unaware about the different types of data
generated from these departments. Thus, their plan of implementing ERP systems at Nike
along with a supply chain system would have helped the organization manage its inventories,
reduce cost of operations, enhance customer relationship, determine better logistic support
and other numerous advantages (Venkatesh 2019). Thus, with the failure of demand planning
system, the manufacturers of Nike went for a phased rolled out and came back with the
successful ERP implementation, thus gaining a competitive advantage amongst its
competitors.
There were three major reasons for which the ERP system execution was successful
for Nike. Firstly, the organizational executives were patient to learn from the mistakes it
made while implementing the system of demand planning. The demand planning system had
software related issues that made the system more complex to function. Due to its complex
infrastructure, the employees were unable to understand how to use it for the enhancement of
the operational activities. Moreover, the system took a lot of time to response and there was
generation of irrelevant data from the system due to software bugs. Hence, these problems

5SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
were addressed in the newly implemented ERP system. The resource planning system was
not much complex to use and incorporated a user-friendly interface (Ganesh and Mehta
2016). It dealt with real-time data from all the 27 departments and generated reports based on
it, but there was no more irrelevancy with data. The system thus took much less time to
response and brought pace in the business activities. Thus, ERP implementation in Nike
recovered all the mistakes that occurred in the demand planning system.
The second reason of success in ERP at Nike was the arrangement of the training and
development plans by the organization for the employees. The organization experienced the
lack of knowledge amongst the members of the company while handling the demand
planning system. The end users did not possess adequate amount of skills to operate the
system and its related software. Hence, the demand planning system was a failure and Nike
did not want the same to happen for ERP associated activities. Hence, the organization took
effective measures in arranging a training period of 140-180 hours for the employees to
explain them in details about the resource planning system and the activities associated with
it (Halim et al. 2019). The employees gained an accurate knowledge of the functionalities of
the system and could handle it with expertise even in adverse scenarios. Meanwhile, the
systems of the users were locked out such that they could not use it during their training time.
Hence, it was mandatory for every end user of the ERP system in the company to attend the
development session before using the live system.
The third reason of success for the ERP system in Nike was the usage of the
phenomenon called ‘Business Process Reengineering’. BPR refers to the re usage of the
existing systems in the organization and renovating them in a way to align it with the
business goals and achieve them successfully. Hence, Nike used the BPR processes to keep
the advantages of the existing systems and only renovate the ones that were disadvantageous

6SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
or of no use (Alvi and Awan 2017). This helped the employees to accustom themselves with
the change in an effective way and they could clarify the performance-based goals.
Answer 3
Phased Rollout refers to the process of migration adapted by an organization to move
from an existing business system to a more advanced software system to optimize the
operational activities in a business (Xia et al. 2019). The manufacturing organization of Nike
too, wanted to implement a resource planning system for the whole enterprise such that they
can track the overall activities of all the 27 order management systems and take effective
decisions to expand their business arena. Their plan to implement a demand planning system
initially failed due to software related issues and lack of knowledge and training amongst the
employees about the system (Zhuo et al. 2016). After the mentioned failure, the organization
went through a phase rollout period to detect the reasons for the unsuccessful venture. It also
created an efficient roadmap for the success of the ERP implementation.
After the rollout phase, Nike started with a single-instance ERP system in the year of
2000 at a Canadian department for an experimental purpose (Subramanian and Taterh 2018).
After gaining success in the Canadian venture, the company eventually implemented the
same in the Asia-Pacific as well as in the Latin America region by 2006 and many other
regions worldwide in the upcoming years. It also trained more than 6300 end users on how to
use the systems in the business activities for beneficiary purposes and bring in profit for the
company from all the stores throughout the world. Obwegeser et al. (2019), says that the
phased rollout was a much-needed migration for the organization to detect its mistakes from
the demand planning system and thus successfully implement the ERP system without
repeating any single mistake done previously.

7SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
References
Alvi, Z. and Awan, M.M., 2017. Implementing Enterprise System in Large State-owned
utilities: A case study. ICT and Innovation, p.7.
Anantatmula, V.S. and Rad, P.F., 2018. Role of organizational project management maturity
factors on project success. Engineering Management Journal, 30(3), pp.165-178.
Ganesh, L. and Mehta, A., 2016. Understanding cloud based ERP implementation in light of
conventional ERP implementation at Indian SMEs: A case study. Available at SSRN
2782244.
Halim, R.M.A., Arafeh, M., Sweis, G. and Sweis, R., 2019. Critical Success Factors for
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems from the Stakeholders’ Perspective: The Case of
Jordan. Modern Applied Science, 13(1).
Kerzner, H. (2019). Using the project management maturity model: strategic planning for
project management. John Wiley & Sons.
Kostalova, J. and Tetrevova, L., 2018. Proposal of Project Management Methods and Tools
Oriented Maturity Model. Gestão e Projetos: GeP, 9(1), pp.1-23.
Obwegeser, N., Danielsen, P., Hansen, K.S., Helt, M.A. and Nielsen, L.H., 2019. Selection
and training of super-users for ERP implementation projects. Journal of Information
Technology Case and Application Research, 21(2), pp.74-89.
Seelhofer, D. and Graf, C.O., 2018. National project management maturity: a conceptual
framework. Central European Business Review, 7(2), p.1.

8SUCCESSFUL ERP PLANNING IN NIKE
Subramanian, R. and Taterh, S., 2018. Risk based ERP Implementation framework for
Higher Education Institutions. International Journal of Pure and Applied
Mathematics, 119(12), pp.16211-16221.
Venkatesh, V., 2019. “One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All”: Teaching MBA Students Different ERP
Implementation Strategies. Journal of Information Systems Education, 19(2), p.2.
Xia, T., Bhardwaj, S., Dmitriev, P. and Fabijan, A., 2019, May. Safe velocity: a practical
guide to software deployment at scale using controlled rollout. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st
International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-
SEIP) (pp. 11-20). IEEE.
Zhuo, D., Zhang, Q., Yang, X. and Liu, V., 2016, November. Canaries in the Network.
In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (pp. 36-42).