I Need Help With A 2-3 Page Paper I Would Pay About 15 On Other Sites Pleas Help

a 2- to 3-page (@ 400 wpp) response to the

following questions:

·

How might Riordan

Manufacturing assess the business value delivered by an outsourcing

relationship?

·

What are International Truck’s

needs and how could cloud computing and virtualization be used to help them

with their need for timely information, their interface with dealers, and the

extension of systems into the vehicles?

Note. Use “Case Study” posted

in the Week 3 Individual Assignment thread of the Course Materials forum to

answer the second question.

CASE STUDY: (from Management information

systems for the information age (8th

Ed.) )

Service-oriented architectures (SoAs) do seem to be the future for

integrated IT systems within an organization, bringing together both

applications and information in a seamless fashion. But SoAs are still in their

infancy, and some companies don’t want to wait until they mature. They are

willing to bet on a service oriented architecture right now. One such company is

International Truck and Engine Corporation. International Truck’s SoA resulted from

needing more timely information so it could identify assembly-plant problems

sooner. Its current IT systems, all legacy information systems, didn’t share

information easily, and that led to bottlenecks in production, excessive defects

and returns, shortfalls in inventory, and a host of other problems that can

spell doom for a manufacturing-intensive company like International Truck.

So, the company

forged ahead in embracing an SoA, knowing that it would be able to buy many of

the software components that it needed and that others would have to be written

from scratch by in-house IT specialists. The first focus for International Truck

was the Common Vehicle Tracking system, a system that tracks production

according to a specific vehicle or vehicle type. International truck produces

everything from RV motor homes to military transports.

The

Common Vehicle Tracking system was a high profile, high-payoff project with a

tight deadline. The company expected the system to save it at least $3 million

annually. The system, now complete and installed in one factory, tracks in near

real time all information relating to works-in-progress and finished inventory.

Prior to its implementation, Art Data, Vice President of Information Technology

at International Truck, succinctly explained “We weren’t doing it very well.”

International Truck’s legacy systems stored isolated data and information in

applications such as computer aided manufacturing, in-house developed order

management, and even commercial ERP software. The new system uses a combination of many

different types of software, one of the primary goals of a service-oriented

architecture. For example, it uses a data integration tool from SSA Global to

extract information from International Truck’s Baan ERP system. From there,

in-house developed software bridges to the order management

system.

International Truck is also working on an SoA extension to interface

with the systems of its dealers. The company already has a centralized server

that its 400 dealers use to access parts catalogs and sales tools. However,

dealers can choose their own internal dealer management software systems. This

makes communicating information in a common format problematic, at best.

International Truck is currently working with automotive industry software

vendors to create common services (i.e., software modules) that will communicate

information in a standard format. In the future, International Truck will

even extend its SoA architecture perspective into the vehicles themselves. Using

the vehicles’ electronics system, GPS, and cellular technology, owners of the

trucks will be able to track the location of their vehicles.