(#1) Under the previous and existing IT system of NIBCO, the growth of the company is hindered in terms of segregated systems, networks and data management. With the new enteprise resource planning (ERP) system, the company can focus more on strategic planning and change management in order to reach its new business goals and attain progressive operational growth. Moreover, information management under the existing system of the company is considered poor and not oriented to global business perspectives (“NIBCO’s Big Bang,” cited in Brown et al., 2012, p. 468). With the ERP system, different activities in manufacturing can be integrated, including communication channels, distribution, sales order, finance, inventory, billing and human resources,…show more content… The benefits that are expected with the new system are as follows: more than a million worth of improvement in operations; reduced costs in inventory; an estimate of 6% ROI; implementation of new policies in the supply chain; customer-oriented interface; development of strategic processes (471) on “network management,” backup policies, system change and business relationships (480); better use of work time through remote access and support availability (anytime and anywhere) of NIBCO’s sytems (478); process integration with decentralized points of failure; standardization of tasks and relative simplicity (“What is SAP,” n.d.); “real-time online processing;” and employee certification / licenship on the use of R/3 upon completion of training