Campbell Soup Case Study

Part 1: Describe how the decision to implement SAP at Campbell Soup reflects an organisational perspective on information management.

Campbell Soup Company was put back on positive development track after implemented the SAP project in North American by the end of year in 2008. In 2001, Douglas Conant was named CEO with the difficult reality that Campbell was lagged behind its competitors such as Kraft and Nestle at that time, which had became more powerful by consolidating other small companies and realized that customers tended to more sensitive to health and price. Furthermore, Campbell had to face the pressure from its downstream retail partners with its own brand. It is, therefore, Conant commenced the reformation of resources planning

The right company culture would influence the company’s behavioral consistency, social control performance, and increase staff motivation which would happen spontaneously themselves as mentioned by CEO of Zappos.com: Tony Hsieh). Campbell was beset with difficulties and required to rebuilt an effective business framework. Campbell performed a strong organisational culture during the process that operated with clearly integrated planning, opened working circumstance and mutual reliance within the company. Managers and employees in Campbell worked together as a partnership with the same objectives. It was an effective way to share information and transferred their tacit and explicit knowledge into the new company owned culture and resources. Higher efficiency of operation helped Campbell process with a clear and integrated preparation. Each phase had been critical handled and prepared since the CEO rethought company’s IT organisation. Thinking IT, building IT infrastructure, mapping transformation, planning, organising and managing for changes constituted a streamline procedure so that the deployment went smoothly with good basis of programming. The deploying process was fully reflected the culture of Campbell’s ability of team work and strategic planning. In addition, they worked in good faith which is a significant factor with successful implementation. Mutual trust and cooperation

Managers in Campbell showed the impressive leadership performance. They were highly endorsed and involved into the business transformation with vision of executives. Conant and other senior managers had a strong determination that framework of business in Campbell should be changed for implementing their reformation. Good leadership provides competitive advantages (Mensch & Dingman,2010), therefore, leader have to apply with foresight to set up a specific and feasible objectives, motivations that encourage employees to be ambitious, analytical ability for quality control and skills of monitoring the conflict and daily business. Leadership is the ability to balance the overall situation (Mitki, Shani, & Stjernberg, 2008). During the organizing process, Campbell’s management framework paid more attention on senior leaders to supervise the implementation and ensure the project to success. A sponsor team included CIO, CFO, and President of Campbell North America, had worked on progress reviewing and resources supplying to make sure project reach the objectives. Other two experienced Vice president and the IBM project managers along with three senior managers composed an operating committee to deal with the inter-dependencies among the implementation. There are, in addition,