Operating_Systems

Riordan Manufacturing Review Team A Business Systems/ BSA310 4 September 2012 Julian Ammons Riordan Manufacturing Review Riordan Manufacturing is a global plastics manufacturer that employs around 550 personnel and has projected annual earnings of $46 million. The company is owned by Riordan Industries, a Fortune 1000 enterprise with revenues in excess of $1 billion. Team A’s task is to review the Home page and the Finance, and Accounting page located on the intranet site for Riordan Manufacturing. Based on the review Team A will identify and describe existing and needed business systems and subsystems. Home Page Riordan Manufacturing’s intranet home page has the basic information that most companies would put into a company home page. It has the usual background of the company history plus Six Sigma accreditations, and describes how their Research & Development department exceeds ISO 9000 standards as well as a mission statement which states their focus, customer relationships, employees, and their future. The home page is not very detailed with links that redirect you to the home page of the different department information. There are many acronyms, that some people may never heard off. The structure is basic and not very detailed, which includes links that will direct you to the main pages of the different company departments. [pic] Team A’s suggestion will be to incorporate a timecard and scheduling into a link on the homepage to allow for easy labor tracking, preferably this would be located before you could enter their “employee site” from the intranet link. Another suggestion would be to have a link on the home page to different available employee positions, which has the ability to apply for those different positions within the company. Finance and Accounting Riordan Manufacturing has its own Finance and Accounting information system for recording company data. The link is located next to the Home page tab and it stores the data separately and sends information for consolidated to corporate offices in San Jose, California only. Riordans’ finance and accounting components are many, general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, order entries, procurement, sales and purchasing history, invoicing and shipping, payroll, financial reporting, and bar code reading, although the bar code reading is for the San Jose office only. Riordan Manufacturing updated the Finance and Accounting System recently, but some compatibility problems and glitches appeared due to a lack of testing and good training. San Jose uses Microsoft Windows ® based Finance and Accounting software, Michigan uses a vendor developed application that was written by a vendor who is no longer in business, and Georgia uses a vendor program that was developed in UNIX source code. All three of the different operating entities each use their own software for their finance and accounting management, thus all of them being the main cause of the compatibility issues between the offices. With The different software languages, most of the input data would not be transferable without extra labor to convert it. The company will need to standardize the system across the board. The company needs to offer a contract to buy a new seamless system or they can outsourced their company Information to a company specialized in information systems to handle the processes. One of Team A’s suggestion would be to upgrade the systems to cloud computing. By doing this, all information and data would be easily transferable to any one of the locations without the need to convert. This will provide all of the different business entities within Riordan Manufacturing to be able to use the same software to input all financial data by using a SaaS or Software-as-a-Service (2012). This will reduce the need for monthly audits and would help to comply with the government required reporting standards. Finance and accounting seems to be quite a closed circuit so to speak as well. The intranet claims to be an employee site although its presented more as a guest site. The finance and accounting page is quite bare, many of its components are not seen such as the accounts payable and receivable. The inventory is the same as the invoice although the invoice is in an excel sheet. The finance and accounting website needs to be updated. All that is visible is two years of service. There needs to be more links as well as an updated history of financial accounting. References Software as a Service (SaaS) [online]. (2010). Available from: . [Accessed September,4 2012].