Jackson Laboratory: A Detailed Report on ERP System Implementation

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the ERP implementation journey undertaken by Jackson Laboratory, a non-profit research institution. The report details the organization's decision to implement the Oracle 11i ERP system, its selection process, and the challenges encountered during the project. Despite facing internal and external difficulties, including staffing limitations and the unique requirements of their mouse research, Jackson Laboratory successfully implemented the system within a six-month delay and within budget. The report highlights the importance of preparatory steps, such as selecting a fixed-fee contract, purchasing a surety bond, and investing heavily in employee training. It also examines the phased implementation approach and the adaptation of the Oracle process manufacturing module. Ultimately, the report assesses the success of the ERP adoption, providing valuable insights into project management and enterprise system implementation for similar organizations.

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NAME OF STUDENT
COURSE NAME

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Executive Summary
The purpose of this report is to discuss the ERP implementation journey of one of the
non-profit research company called Jackson Laboratory. It takes large number of preparatory
steps to reduce the risk of the ERP project and despite several internal and external
challenges, it is able to implement the complete systems in the approved budget and just six
months delay from its original planned timeline of 1 year. Apart from this, this paper looks
into the implementation approach of the company, approach of selecting the Oracle vendor
and brief overview of the Oracle 11i ERP system and other important aspect of the project
that makes it successful.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary.................................................................................................................1
1. Describe the subject organisation and explain the problem or opportunity it faced...........2
2. Describe the nature of the enterprise system that it adopted and the process by which it
was selected and implemented...................................................................................................3
3. Explain and analyse any difficulties the organisation may have faced in adopting
the system, or preparatory steps that were taken to facilitate implementation..........................5
4. Provide an assessment of how successful was the adoption of the enterprise system and
any success metrics that were used............................................................................................7
5. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9

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1. Introduction
ERPs systems have become quite important in this globally competitive environment
where organisations wants to cut the costs. With the help of these systems, organizations can
implement the industry best practices and can collaborate their business departments. At the
same time, these packages are expensive packages as they automate large number of non-
value adding business processes. Due to the size and complexity of these projects, there is
also considerable risk in these projects. However, if the company take the right approach and
consider all the risk items and tries to mitigate them in advance, it can improve the changes of
project success. There are various ways to implement the ERP system in the organization.
The organizations can use the traditional approach of on premise implementation or they can
use cloud based implementation. There are pros and cons of each of the approach. It is
recommended that organization should analyse their internal and external environment before
making the decision. Some organizations would want to use the cloud based system as it is
simple (Chaushi, Chaushi & Dika, 2016, 12). Moreover, it is relatively easy to scale the cloud
based ERP system. However, the two key risks associated with cloud based system are
privacy risks and security risks. It is recommended that organizations must also analyse these
risks before making any decision.
2. Describe the subject organisation and explain the problem or
opportunity it faced.
The organization chosen is Jackson Laboratory. It is a non-profit research based
institution whose goal is to discover genomic solutions for diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer’s
and Diabetes and empower the global community and improve the human health. It is
founded in 1929 and based out of Bar Harbor, Maine. It also has pioneered the usage of Mice
in healthcare industry to research the cure for various diseases and achieve a significant

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breakthrough in identifying the techniques to cure various deadly diseases. It decided to
implement Oracle 11i ERP systems and its budget was 5 million USD and 1 year timeline.
ERP projects are quite complex project that requires change management, training to
employees, changing business processes of the company to align with the ERP packages and
also customizing the ERPs in case the company business process is not supported by the ERP
and is very critical for the company (Narayanamurthy & Gurumurthy 2017, 555). In most of
the cases, the change management with ERP us not easy to handle as the implementation of
ERP bring fundamental and radical changes in the organization. The implementation of any
ERP project needs time and investment. It is important that organizations should be able to
use the resources at their disposal for the implementation of ERP (Conteh & Akhtar 2015,
12).
Apart from it, there is no dearth of ERP projects that started with a huge zeal but
gradually failed due to several reasons, sometimes the end users were not supportive,
sometime the product itself is not suitable to the vendors, sometimes the organizations ignore
the importance of having effective change management team, sometimes organizations
pushed the timeline to see the output as soon as possible and ignore the testing and training
needs.
In case of Jackson Laboratory, it is very lean in terms of staffing and when the critical
employees have contributed in the implementation project, they do not have much bandwidth
to do their day to day activities. Apart from it, there is only 1 person, CFO Wilbur who has
prior experience of working in ERP projects. The other problem is that it had already
purchased the license of oracle process Manufacturing (OPM) module that supports the
business processes of manufacturing related to mixing of ingredients to produce the final
product. However, company realizes that its requirement is quite unique and seven week

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mice and 8 week mice were treated as different product however it is not the case with the
ERP system. As a result, integrating mouse development function in oracle is a complex task.
Human resources also created problem as there is always resistance of change whenever
company is taking such bigger step as employees are insecure about the job (Fryling, 2015).
3. Describe the nature of the enterprise system that it adopted and the
process by which it was selected and implemented.
Jackson laboratory has selected the Oracle 11i ERP system. Sap and oracle are the 2
largest ERP vendor that captures more than 60% of the ERP market. Oracle 11i systems
consists of several tracks like Finance, Manufacturing, Supply chain Planning, Customer
relationship Management, Quote and order Management, Transportation and logistics
management as well as Human resource (Ha & Ahn, 2014, 8). Oracle is a reputed
organization in the market. One of the things that stand apart for Oracle is the after sales
support. The company provides excellent support to its customers.
Each of these tracks further consists of the modules. For instance, Finance consists of
Account payables, Account receivable, cash management, fixed assets, and general ledger.
Supply chain consist of Demand forecasting, supply planning, procurement, iSupplier.
Manufacturing consists of Inventory, discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, Bills of
material, quality management, work in process. Human resource consists of Payroll, benefit
plans, talent management. Quote and order management consists of configurator, quote
system, order management. CRM consists of depot repair, field services, warranty claims.
Oracle 11i provides the integrated process flows that flows across the departments and thus
automate the various business processes and also enhances collaboration due to the flow of
the data (Oracle.com, 2018). For instance, consider the order to cash business processes that
consist of the entire cycle from quote generation, order booking, order shipping, invoicing

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and receiving. Oracle supports all these functionalities and thus provide a unified view of the
business process. For instance, once the quote is available, it can easily be converted to sales
order. Once sales order is shipped, it can easily be invoiced by finance and thus there is no
redundancy and manual entry. Also, at a given point of time, there is only 1 copy of data that
is visible to all the departments and thus there is no confusion. Big organizations like General
electric, cisco has implemented the Oracle ERP and achieved large benefits (Mann, et al.
2017, 148).
Jackson has prepared a list of its internal department and key functions and then evaluated
the different ERPs available in the market and then try to align their offerings with its
requirements. Once it has shortlisted the ERP vendors, it can request for quote and select the
appropriate vendor. Some organisations also selects the ERP vendor by conducting the GAP
analysis in the initial itself to avoid any surprises later (Vaidyanathan, & Fox 2017, 2). For
instance, these organizations prepares a detailed list of their business processes and
functionalities needed and then hires vendors like IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG that can
conduct a Fit gap analysis. In this analysis, vendor will compare the requirement with ERP
offerings and evaluate if it is supported, it is direct fit and it is not directly supported, it is gap
that needs to be bridged either by changing business process or customizing the standard ERP
packages (Altamony, Al-Salti, Gharaibeh & Elyas 2016, 691). This approach though
expensive initially but do not bring surprises later on. For instance, if the Jackson would have
used this strategy, it would have known in advanced that Oracle process manufacturing
system will not support their mice processes and thus can evaluate the other vendors also.
Jackson laboratory has chosen to go live in a phased manner rather than big bang
approach as this approach drastically reduces the risk associated with going live. It first phase
consists of implementing production capacity, account receivables and some general ledger
functions and went live in February/ After that, some other modules went live like account

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payables, fixed assets and the entire general ledger module. During the 2nd phase, remaining
modules like Human resource, process management, payroll, grant filing and labour
distribution applications went live. This phased approach of the implementation help the
organization to give the time to its end users to change gradually rather than in a single shot.
As a result, users were much more comfortable with the systems and also confident after the
1st phase go live and this is really needed for the success of the project (Tarhini, Ammar, &
Tarhini 2015, 25).
Also, Jackson laboratory initially planned to go for the Vanilla implementation and
leverage the out of box functionalities of oracle so that the project costs and duration can be
minimized especially when it has very lean staff. However, it soon find out that oracle 11i
process manufacturing module is not designed for their business requirement of mouse
situations. As handling mice function is one of the most important requirement, it changed
the implementation choice from vanilla to middle of the road and decided to make changes in
the OPM product to make it work for their business processes.
4. Explain and analyse any difficulties the organisation may have faced
in adopting the system, or preparatory steps that were taken to
facilitate implementation.
CFO, Wilbur was the only person who has prior experience of ERP projects which makes
him aware about the common issues in ERP implementation projects like cost overruns,
project over delays, poor response by the end users and thus Jackson takes very good actions
not only to facilitate the implementation but also to make it successful (CFO, 2018). For
instance, time and material mode of the project execution was quite common for such ERP
projects and this project has large timeline because the vendor do not have motivation for go
live as they are getting the money for their resources (Ram, & Corkindale 2014, 152). On the

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other hand, in fixed price, vendors are motivated to complete the project as soon as possible
and deploy the resources in other projects. Jackson decided to execute the project as fixed fee
contract. Apart from this, it also purchased the surety bond from Gladwayne, which is a risk
management consulting firm. This also gives the company cushion to protect itself from
unforeseen events and also if their obligations are not met, they are liable to recover the
losses from these bonds. These bonds were not quite common in IT industry as they are in
construction industry.
Apart from it, Wilbur clearly knows that change management is an important pillar
and thus training was given a special importance and a huge 450,000 USD million were spent
to train 32 employees. This is an important step as there are examples of organizations like
Hershey whose ERP implementation was a failure due to lack of training given to users
(Chung, Ahmad, & Tang, 2015). In a large scale ERP implementation, training of employees
can be a game changer. It is observed that the implementation projects where adequate
training is provided are more successful as compared to the projects where adequate training
is not provided.
Also, as Jackson is a not profit organisation, it has a lean staffing model. There are
only 2,3 people at the top in each department and they are loaded with additional
responsibilities of providing their inputs in this ERP implementation project which left a little
time for them to do their regular job activities. This could have an impact on the timeline of
the project (Ranjan, Jha & Pal 2017, 370). Jackson also has to deal with the internal human
resources and it’s also realized that the oracle process manufacturing module is not capable of
handling their requirement. Although it was a challenging task but it finally managed to
integrate the mouse functions with the oracle 11i system. It also have included the buffer time
in the implementation cycle so that there is no pressure of rushing even if there are some
minor delays due to unforeseen challenges (Koch & Mitteregger 2016, 82).

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Thus, most of the problems and challenges that could have become a major issue later on
have already been taken care by the Jackson. This is a good sign for the organization and it
shows the positive readiness of the organization about the change (Rajan & Baral 2015, 105).
5. Provide an assessment of how successful was the adoption of
the enterprise system and any success metrics that were used.
Time and money are the 2 important metrics to check the success of project. Going by the
standards of project management, this project was completed at almost the budgeted cost and
as far as timeline is concerned, it took 6 months longer to complete. This project was very
much successful considering the fact that it is an ERP project. ERP projects are generally
mission critical and multi-year and multi million contracts and still there is no guarantee of
success as there are large number of stakeholders, dependencies and complexities.
Nestle took 6 years to implement the ERP and it had to stop and restart its project due to
some issues. The cost incurred was more than 300 million USD even there were top notch
consultants like IBM were involved. Hershey ERP project was a failure because when it went
live, users did not know how to use the new system and eventually, it did not able to book the
orders and it was also a peak time. Fox Meyer went bankrupt in implementing ERP systems.
There are numerous examples of failure and risks (Harwood 2017, 7).
Considering the above factors, the project was quite successful. Jackson has handled most
of the expected things well in advance by making appropriate arrangements and also secure
itself against losses by buying surety bonds form another company who is liable to pay the
losses to the Jackson in case the obligations are not met by the implementation company.
There were surprises like Oracle process manufacturing do not support the business
requirements but that was also taken care by customizing the ERP package. However,
organization was able to overcome these surprises. This was a positive sign for the

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organization and as a result they were able to manage the change of ERP implementation in
an effective and efficient manner.
6. Conclusion
ERP projects are quite complex project. There are always multiple vendor involved and
large number of stakeholders that delays the things. Vendors also tries to complicate the
things sometimes. ERP vendors also during the time of selling their products promises much
larger things their product is capable of doing but when it comes to implementation, their
product falls short of expectations. Apart from these external challenges, there are numerous
internal challenges. End users are comfortable in using the legacy systems and idea of
implementing ERP makes them insecure about their job and also raises questions if they will
be able to learn the new technology. ERP projects also put additional pressure on the existing
people as they will be having some additional tasks apart from their day to day
responsibilities. As a result, there is a general tendency among the end users to resist the
change however if the management is supportive and strong, it can take its employees in
confidence by providing them appropriate training, setting appropriate incentives and
motivating them. As the CFO of Jackson, Wilbur has prior experience with ERP
implementation project, he did a good preparation of handling most of the expected problems
in ERP projects and also buying the bonds to safe itself against the inefficient of
implementation vendor or the in capabilities of the product. All these efforts makes the
project success despite numerous challenges and it is completed well within budget. It can set
as benchmark for the other ERP projects where delays and cost overruns are considered
normal.

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References
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Conteh, Nabie Y., and M. Jalil Akhtar.2015. "Implementation challenges of an enterprise
system and its advantages over legacy systems." International Journal on Computer
Science and Engineering 7, no. 11: 120.
Chung, Sock H., S. Imtiaz Ahmad, and Hung-Lian Tang. 2015. "Symptoms, causes and
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Ha, Y. M., & Ahn, H. J. 2014. Factors affecting the performance of Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) systems in the post-implementation stage. Behaviour & Information
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Fryling, Meg. 2015. "Investigating the effect of customization on rework in a higher
education enterprise resource planning (erp) post-implementation environment: A system
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Harwood, Stephen. 20017. ERP: The implementation cycle. Routledge.
Koch, S. and Mitteregger, K., 2016. Linking customisation of ERP systems to support effort:
an empirical study. Enterprise Information Systems, 10(1), pp.81-107.