PART A-
Nithin Kumar Mali
317 W Mathews ave
Stillwater.
May 09, 2014.
Dear Mark Endry,
In today’s world to withstand competition from competitors, a company has to have the ability to adapt, respond and align itself with its business needs. The implementation of PROOF is highly commendable especially to promote growth, to improve business process and to lay the foundation to meet the information system requirements of future. J.D.Edwards focused on four corporate strategies operational excellence, focused revenue growth, knowledge and committed workforce and world-class marketing and the above strategies have driven J.D.Edwards towards progress.
The project PROOF specifically intended to address issues such as standardization of processes and information integration. This led to the benefits of lowered software development and maintenance costs of web-client rather than a fat-client environment. The PROOF had successfully implemented a unique software internally. Most important factor for the success of project PROOF was the way change was managed within the company.
Implementing vanilla OneWorld Web WolrdWide for internal use by over 5,000 employees of the company is one of the most emphasizing objectives of PROOF and the implementation of vanilla model is successful. To well introduce a product into market, the company has to test the product exclusively to see the performance of product. The PROOF implementation process served as a reference to customers for the J.D.Edwards implementation methodology. PROOF is a contributing factor for a company to become more of a process driven company
PROOF was implemented in phased approach. In a phased approach, each of these modules may be implemented separately; hence there is a chance that configuration changes may be made along the way those conflicts with previous settings. The scope of the project was to migrate all users and functionality form WolrdSoftware to OneWorld Web globally across the enterprise. The project affected five main groups of business processes: Order to cash, Services, Procure to pay/asset management, Manage the business, Workforce management.
Most important attribute of PROOF is its team members. Though it was critical to identify the senior managers in user departments to serve as process owners for the major process area, they have well served the internal processes towards best business practices. Most interesting thing is that both process owners and team leaders worked to make sure that final product supports different cultures, languages, geographies. Project communication is a challenge in every project and it had been a high preference in the PROOF and realized by company intranet Knowledge garden and internal communications by meetings.
Financial organization in PROOF spent significant efforts wrestling with service billing which included reviewing financials, determining accuracy, checking invoices, verifying invoices and sending confirmation. This ensured the invoices are sent correctly without any errors which was one of the issues in the past. Project team had reprioritized and shifted focus from parallel to sequential process integration which was a great move because the process users were not willing to accept the changes in the initial standardization plans.
Clear communication was a high priority in PROOF which is a good sign. An integration communication helped the PROOF project and training plans. Based on the application being deployed end-user training strategy changed accordingly which helped PROOF train end-users most efficiently. Since accounts payable is very important to a company it is more important to train them well and in PROOF training was given by sending them to classroom training and other application users such as time entry users were given Web-based training. Focusing people on cross-department processes also helped PROOF to see a large picture.
PROOF has faced an unexpected staffing problem on the user
