Information Processing System of Riordan Manufacturing - Assignment Example

Currently, financial information is not available until 20 days after the close of a financial period. The four locations all use different accounting systems and much of the data needs to be converted before being consolidated in the home office at San Jose. San Jose currently has a fully integrated Windows ERP system and it is recommended that the locations in Georgia, Michigan, and China investigate moving to a compatible system.The sales and marketing departments have not kept pace with available information technology and the historical information on sales and marketing research is a piecemeal system that is outdated.

The service request should recommend that all salespersons be put on the same sales software to be recommended later. In addition, salespersons should all have wireless laptops to communicate with the home office or manufacturing in real-time. The marketing department could also benefit from an updated market analysis system. This phase should be easily accomplished due to the relatively small number of customers involved.The hardware situation also needs to be evaluated. The corporate headquarters in San Jose currently has 35 Dell systems running Windows 2000.

Upgrading the OS on these 35 computers may be of benefit to the company. The hardware is sufficient but is aging and recommendations should be made for replacing it as it begins to become obsolete or lost due to failure. The Albany facility is operating with 20 Compaq Presario that are running an outdated version of Windows. These should be replaced to take advantage of a newer OS and faster speeds.The manufacturing facility in Michigan also has outdated computer hardware and software. They have 45 client computers running Windows 98, which is no longer supported.

In addition, the OS limits the system as to the available software. The China manufacturing plant has 40 Dell computers running Windows 2000, which is the same as San Jose.