Boeing Australia Limited

PART A: Issues that need to be considered in upgrading BAL’s procurement platform are:
• Integration capabilities of programs required by customers: Because there are special considerations for tracking that must be considered due to the nature of the product.
• Autonomous operations of divisions – Considering their autonomous nature, it would be extremely beneficial if the new system would help make operations throughout all units and geographical locations more transparent so that everyone could work toward the same goals rather than focusing only on their own internal goals.
• Employee resistance – if employees are not allowed any involvement in the decision and ultimate development of any new system there will be resistance to change. How to integrate these new system(s) should be a consideration as much as what to purchase.
• Available resources – Management has restricted the resources available to purchase this system. This will make it necessary to look at only what is a “must have” rather than just a “nice to have” in the system. This is where employees should be invited to register their opinions on the new software and processes.
• Management position – Since management still seems to be leaning toward patching together the old systems they will need to be convinced if the decision is made to change procedures or software. Ultimately, they are the ones who will ok the spend.
• Legacy systems – possible integration, data transference capabilities. We need to consider, especially if going with a new software system, if there is an easy way to transfer the accumulated data on the legacy systems. If not, a plan needs to be implemented on how to get the data into the new system. 
• Company geography – Any adjustments to the system or upgrades to software need to take into consideration the multiple locations of this company. It should help the company to operate as though they were all under the same roof and allow them to access all data within the company.
• Integration of supplier systems – Which suppliers are able to accept EDI? If we are setting up with new software we should ensure that it is valid now and into the future. This means considering our future needs with larger vendors including EDI. 
• Support – How much support is available within the cost of the software and how much more time are we going to need from our own IT department during this integration.

PART B: I believe all of the above are affected by the size of the company. It has several locations, numerous employees and levels of management as well as a global presence. If the company was smaller there wouldn’t be so many layers of management, or numerous locations. The expense of setting up a system like this would likely be prohibitive to a smaller company and the costs would outweigh the benefits. I feel that a lot of the redundancies that this company faces are because they are a large company trying to operate within a small company framework.