Exploring Process, Enterprise Integration and E-business Concepts in the Classroom: The Case of petPRO

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2004 by Hajnal, Catherine A, Riordan, Robert

Twice during the semester an announcement is made from the Executive Suite (the instructor) describing changes in the company direction. In the first, it is announced that petPRO will embrace e-commerce and start selling their products online. At the same time, the company is going to install an enterprise system. In their functional area group, students are asked to explore the impact of this announcement on their respective function. While the reality of the complexity of these types of changes on the organization is beyond the scope of the class, students come to appreciate that management decisions can and do have an impact on the whole organization and that the decisions have both technology and process implications.

The second announcement involves petPRO being bought by Nestl�. As background to the discussion, students read a CIO magazine article (Worthen, 2002) that describes the challenges encountered by Nestl� in their enterprise system implementation. The students are asked to consider the challenges and whether merging petPRO and Nestl� would be subject to the same. The case re-enforces the exploration of both business and technical aspects of technology implementation. Shared data definitions for enhanced decision-making are also explored through this second announcement.

The most intricate of the simulation activities is the database exercise. This exercise is designed to highlight the difficulties of sharing data between functional areas in a large organization. In this assignment each functional area group is required to request a meaningful set of data from three other arbitrarily designated 'partner' groups. The students are instructed to consider what types of business decisions they might need to make within the context of their business function. They should then consider what data would be helpful in making that decision and request those data from the appropriate function which Owns' that data. The Marketing and Sales group, for example, might ask the Shipping, Receiving and Warehousing group to report on current inventory levels of various products. The data-owners group (Shipping, Receiving and Warehousing in the example) then creates a fictional set of data in a series of Access tables to answer the question. They must also write a set of queries in Access in order to answer the question posed by their partner function in a meaningful way.

A set of required tables must also be produced by each functional area group. These include tables such as a security table that specifies which partner functional areas group has access to which data tables and queries.

Once the databases are received, the instructor imports all the data from the individual databases using a set of routines that rely on the specific format of the student databases. The result is a master database that serves as the backend to an intranet site, and allows function-based access to the data that each group has been allowed to see. An individual student logs into the petPRO 'intranet' website using their student number. The website has embedded logic that allows it to determine of which functional area group a student is a member, and then goes about creating an environment for the student, driven by their group membership. In the specific student's environment they see only the data they are allowed to see, based on the permissions that were set as part of the database assignment. So the Marketing and Sales Group would only be able to see the data that have been explicitly exposed to them by their partner functional area group through the permission table.