Air Products Case Essay Example

Air Products Case Essay Example Air Products Case Essay Air Products Case Essay Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. is a mid-size company that is rooted in three different industries. They are generating income from all three industries and want to continue that upward trend. There are so many new technologies available for Air Products to use to give them competitive advantage. In order to use these new technologies, they will need to rely on their MIS group. Is the MIS group equip to provide such service? With three different industries involved, can MIS help them all? This case will emphasize how MIS can support the business and how to utilize them as a resource rather than a hindrance. 1. COMPANY BACKGROUND Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. is a global company that sells industrial gases, commodity specialty chemicals and process equipment. Air Products has two headquarters: one in Allentown, Pennsylvania and the other in Hersham, United Kingdom. The CEO and chairman is Dexter Baker. The Executive Vice President of MIS is Bob Lovett, the Vice President of MIS is Pete Mather and the Vice President of MIS Europe is John Shepherd. Air Products employees 13,000 people in more than 150 plants worldwide. 2. AS-IS MATRIX Figure 1 outlines Air Products As-Is for both the business and IT group. Air Products service a wide range of customers and competitors due to the three diverse industries they are involved in. Air Product is a strong competitor in all three industries as a result of their continued effort to lower manufacturing and distribution costs. They have also been able to implement a system that gives access to their engineering and database information globally. The Board of directors, stockholders and the management organization development committee are the major governing bodies when it comes to making company wide decisions. Air Products also adhere to government agencies like the PTT in Europe who regulates telecommunications. The organizational structure is setup to be functional based, horizontal and decentralized due to the diverse industries. The key processes are RD, engineering design, manufacturing, sales and marketing. Air Products recruits Ph. D. , MBA, BA and BE graduates from the top business universities in both the US and Europe. In Air Products MIS group, they provide support for many of the key business applications. Most of the applications are specific to one Business unit (BU) area. For example, the CAD/CAM application is used by the Process equipment group and RD Computing is only used for the chemical group. MIS maintains a data center, a DASD (disk storage), various client systems and mainframes to support business operations. MIS has successfully implemented project ICON that transferred Europes data center to the US data center. This allowed global access to one common database and enabled a company wide data consistency. The CIO, MIS directors and functional BU directors make these types of decisions in MIS. The architecture supported in Air Products include Ethernet based LAN and WAN, various client systems, mainframes, Tandem Dec, VAX, video conferencing equipment and telecommunications technology. The key processes of the MIS group provide customer support to our internal and external customer. MIS manages emerging technology, application development, database consistency and technology assessment. MIS recruits from MIS, BE and BS graduates from top technology universities. 3. WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS/OPPORTUNITIES? * SWOT ANALYSIS Figure 3 describes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the business areas and the MIS group. The MIS group generated a strength when they decided to relocated the MIS development group into their business areas and transferred management control to the business managers. MIS was also able to centralize the database access in the ICON project. Additionally, MIS took an active role to re- engineer the customer interface in order to provide 60,000 customers a one point of contact. Another strength came about by finding ways to lower manufacturing and distribution costs while increase sales and income revenue. The weaknesses found in Air Products steams from the diverse business areas. It is hard to work with three very different industries. It causes difficulties when MIS resources need to be shifted around. It limits the career paths for both the business and MIS employees as each area requires different training needs. It also becomes difficult to support and upgrade the various systems in these areas. MIS needs to start taking a different role in their way of supporting the business. There are always opportunities for improvement. Air Products has the opportunity expand their business world wide in order to dominate the three industries. The BU areas can improve upon their role in managing technology within their area. MIS can help improve the odds of MIS staff moving out into the other areas of the company. MIS can also improve customer service by providing global support coverage and provide more business driven services. MIS has to deal with a constant threat of communication failure between the main sites. MIS also has threats from competitors as they fight to attract college graduates from the top universities. MISs governing power over the company is threatened as MIS standards are not being followed. The organizational structure of MIS is threatened due to constant pressure from BU areas to come through with project or changes. * TO-BE MATRIX Figure 2 outlines the To-Be matrix of how Air Products should be in a future. The key to get Air Products to this future stage is to strengthen MIS to better support the business areas. In the To-Be, if MIS guides and directs the business to utilize and incorporate new technology, then Air Products can venture out to compete in other industries or to team up with other firms to work on a new product or service. Air Products could even become consultants to other companies at the areas they are best in and have the most expertise. Air Products would be able to branch out to other areas of the world and dominate competition in these locations worldwide. In the decision-making area, the major difference would be the presence of MIS executives in all the major committees. MIS would be there to bring in new ideas and technology to the business areas or help to initiate joint ventures with two or more areas. The number for strategic internal or external partners would increase due to these initiatives. The type of partners are no longer limited to other industrial firms. For example, Air Products can partner with universities or government laboratories for RD to create or test a new product. All these things listed above can be accomplished if two things changes: the organizational structure of MIS and HR takes a proactive role to hire, train and retain the skills needed to succeed. In Figure 2, the organization structure needs to become a federalist model where MIS becomes both centralized and decentralized. MIS needs to decentralize the areas that support the BU areas directly like the application development and project management. MIS also will need to centralize the standards of HW management and SW management, centralize architecture, integrate and standardize common functions found through out the company. Lastly, HR will need to start becoming more proactive to help the Air Products attract the people and skills they desire. Also to provide guidance in career paths and training after they get hired into the company. They can also provide job postings or project bidding to give employees the opportunities to get some exposure to the rest of the company. * MAJOR PROBLEMS OPPORTUNITIES There are 4 major problems in Air Products that need to be addressed. A. MIS developers were moved in the BU areas but both sides are not certain on how to align themselves to each other. They did not know what to expect when the change was implemented so the BU areas are not managing the MIS resources well. The MIS developers groups do not know enough to help or guide the BU. Their function is to develop what is asked of them from the BU they support. Therefore both sides are lacking vision and direction in terms of development of existing and future technology. B. MIS lags behind in new technology or skills in terms of their resources and is having a hard time getting or keeping those skills in IT and the company. C. MIS has too many diverse systems and they cause lots of problems when trying to upgrade these systems. MIS needs to come up with a plan to standardize equipment both international and US. MIS needs to find a way to better control of the architecture and centralize them. D. MIS needs to work on improving their image to their customers and become more of a key enabler for the BU areas to guide and direct them to gain competitive advantage in their industries. * CONSIDER THE KEY STAKEHOLDERS? In Figure 4, the stakeholders of each problem are listed. For problem A, the key stakeholders are Bob Lovett as sponsor, Pete Mather as champion, MIS development managers as project managers and the BU managers as the group that are placing the requests. The managers are the ones who are mostly affected by this problem. Currently both sides are working with each other as before but now the BU managers have control over the budget. The desired state would be for MIS to help both sides work more effectively with each other in order to gain competitive advantage for that industry. The champion will need to demonstrate to them how to better align themselves together. For problem B, the CEO will need to support this issue as a sponsor. The VP of HR will be the champion and the HR department is the business partner. HR currently is not providing much guidance in the career path of an employee. There are no guidelines for managers to use and no tools available to help employees to get to where they want to go next. The desired state is for the VP of HR and HR to come up with better HR development tools, provide career paths for all areas and create a training guideline for managers to use. For problem C, Pete Mather is the sponsor, John Shepherd, director of MIS in Europe is the champion, Shepherds group is the beachhead group and the outside vendor is the supplier. The current state of the systems is too overwhelming to conduct upgrades. There are too many vendors involved and difficulties of communication with the different systems. The desired state of affairs would be to have one vendor that supplies only one line of systems and the vendor implements and support those systems. For problem D, Bob Lovett is the sponsor, Pete Mather is the champion, the new MIS specialized teams is the enabler and the BU areas is the supported group. The current state of affairs is that the BU areas are not getting any guidance on how to incorporate new technology or improve their current technology and applications. The desired state would be to have MIS provide this guidance so that the BU areas can evaluate and utilize new technology as they arise.