Ilinko Case

Ilinko, when it was first established, its primary business was sourcing and procurement. It provided total solutions to the customers which includes from product design to vendor selections. However after two years, company has decided to expand, launched its own brand called Bloom, which sells babies and children products. However as the size of business grow, the operation of iLinko changed significantly. Instead of selecting and linking the vendor to its customers, it had to actually communicate with the vendors regarding the production issues. Furthermore, ilinko had to deal with increasing amount of information coming from purchase orders such as batch size, delivery dates and shipping, logistic requests. The large amount of information in different form, made iLinko’s operation ineffective (error) and inefficient (slow) , and to manage these information iLinko has decided to implement an ERP system, which allowed it to connect all functional groups in single data in a single platform.

When they first implement the ERP, they had two options. Option A was a globally renowned business management software, and option B was a software developed by an IT company in Hong Kong. Software A was impressive in functional sense, however it was way too costly considering the size of iLinko’s operation. Software B was relatively cheap compared to software A, but its functions were limited. Furthermore, required implementation period for software A was longer than software B. Ilinko, due to financial and time managerial issue, has chosen software B as their first ERP system.

The first ERP system provided services at reasonable price with quick implementation, however as iLinko’s business grow, the lack of function prompted ilinko to consider switching its ERP system. The ERP system ilinko implemented in the beginning was not suitable for a global operation. First of all, the program lacked flexibility. As the operation increases, the level of complexity of information which ilinko had to deal also increased. However, because the system’s flexibility was limited, ilinko was unable to input the new type of information in to the system. Instead they had to create separate spreadsheet to maintain the data. The problem of keeping separate spreadsheet increased the workload of the employee and chances of error. Second of all, software B lacked coverage and functionality. As its operation went global, iLinko received many sales order globally. However because the system is developed and based in Hong Kong, only few customers submitted their order through EDI which was connected to ilinko’s ERP. Most of orders were submitted through email and telephone, which required extra work of clerks to put in to its centralized database. Furthermore, the first ERP system implemented by ilinko didn’t support e commerce and its global warehouse. Again to centralize the data, employee had to bring the data from different system and put it in to the