Rohm and Haas is an international specialty chemical company that has expanded rapidly over the last two decades through acquisitions and divestitures. This had resulted in numerous (over 300) different IT systems with separate reporting systems. Management decided to integrate activities across the functional departments’ business processes and improve the performance of each organization’s resource planning, management control, and operational control.
In this week’s case study, you will be investigating their decisions for the SAP implementation and how total quality management (TQM) was effected. Identify both the purpose and benefits that their system was to have provided and whether those were achieved. Major focus should be given to the decisions and assumption made as well as the reasons made for their selection. There are no specific references given for this case study, only some background information references to help you in your research. It is suggested that in your research, you pay particular attention to the difficulties their rapid expansion caused and how these were addressed.
In this step, you need to find out the questions “what”, “how” and “why” of Rohm and Haas SAP implementation. Start with some basic research on the company and its growth: Research into this company will require you to research the actual software incorporated by Rohm and Haas and what it provides to companies like them. For example, they made extensive use of IBM’s Lotus Sametime solution. What did this provide and in what area of quality management did it assist them?
