Cmgt 575 - It Project Management for Kudler Fine Foods

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The stakeholders of Kudler Fine Foods are the individuals who have a stake or claim in the ERP project plan and line of communications. Communication usually requires a sender, a message, and a receiver, and KFF stakeholders are the receivers of the ERP project information (Marchewka 2009). The KFF stakeholders include the project sponsor, Client, project manager, senior manager, project team.

Based on the stakeholder analysis, the individuals with great interest in the success or failure of this project are as listed below;

Stakeholders Analysis

Stakeholder

Interest

Influence

Potential Conflicts

Role

Objective

Strategy

Kathy Kudler

+1

5

Competition for Resources

Project Sponsor

Provides Approval/

Resources

Maintain Open Communication

Juliet Okereke

+1

3

Resources Not Made Available

Project Manager

Lead/ Manage Project

Close work with Stakeholders/

Project Team

Project Team

+1

2

This Project will bring change to the use of systems in KFF

Joshua Crider (Network

Admin.)

Tony

Rumford

(System

Analyst)

Provide expertise

to complete

the

project work

Support Project Team with adequate resources

Yvonne Reynolds

-1

4

Yvonne is not pleased with this ERP project choice

Contender

Building a

strict use of resources

Maintain open

communication, use sponsor’s

influence

Figure 3 Stakeholders Analysis for Kudler Fine Foods ERP project

Philosophies and Principles

Kudler Fine Foods (KFF) needs to ensure that the data between the three stores, securely and accessible, while streamlining the sharing between the stores to ensure that ordering is simplified, and sales are not lost from out of stock (OOS) items or miscommunications between the stores. As part of streamlining the data sharing between the stores, KFF will be implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Before undergoing a new project, an organization should first define the project quality plan and the philosophies and principles behind the plan (Marchewka, 2012). The main philosophy for KFF is customer satisfaction and improving the core processes for them; for KFF this is inventory management, payments, sales, and costs. By streamlining the processes, KFF will be able to ensure the customers get the quality products at competitive prices. With a focus on customer satisfaction, KFF principles for the quality plan will be to reduce operating expenses, standardize the ordering process, and improve cash flow by ensuring the correct amount of products are stocked to lower OOS and avoid cash spent on items that will just sit on the shelf.

Standards and Metrics

Standards must be meaningful and defined in measurable organizational value (MOV) with the projects goals as a baseline (Marchewka, 2012). For KFF, the MOV is to ensure that sales are not lost to OOS while not overstocking leaving cash tied up in unpurchased products. To do this Kathy needs to be able to see the exact stock of each item in each store as well as how many of each item have been sold, on average, each day. The tolerance for each item needs to be above 95% availability without OOS while keeping stock within 15 each of the daily averages per item. Kathy needs the ability to be able to pull the stock into any store and any item on the fly with 95% accuracy or above. Ensuring the data is available and accurate will be a major deciding factor in the ERP implementation.

Verification

The verification stage will be used to ensure that the process related activities of the project meet the specific requirements and deliverables set by and agreed upon by the project stakeholders. Perform verification on the ERP application by utilizing the capability maturity model integration (CMMI) tool to utilize recommended practices that define key process areas. Initially, this model will determine the software maturity of the project to ensure the processes that are being integrated fit well with other software already in place.

The ERP application undergoes verification at several points in the project, including requirements building, initial design, and development to determine if the software has increased to a new level of maturity. A technical review will be conducted to ensure the back-end infrastructure conforms to the specific requirements of the project. Before the development stage, the IT Team will lead stakeholders through a walkthrough of the technical design where they can ask questions, provide comments, and point out areas of concern. A business review will be performed using the equipment to verify it provides the required functionality as stated in the project plan.

This process will occur before choosing

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