We concluded that our role was to pay the resulting
bills, and that we should not be holding the other
departments’ hands to make sure that their process-
es did not break down. And we certainly should not
be placing unfair burdens upon our vendors.
So we decided to make some fundamental
changes in what we did and how we did it. We told
the people in our organization what we wanted to do
and why we wanted to do it and gave them the charge
to make the necessary changes. After about 9 months
we discovered that we were getting nowhere—it was
just not moving. Obviously we could not just top-
down it and get the results we wanted. With the help
of a consultant we went back to the drawing board
and studied how to drive this thing from the ground
up rather than from the top down. We discovered that
our people were very provincial—they saw every-
thing in terms of accounts payable and had little per-
spective on the overall procurement process. We had
to change this mind-set, so we spent almost a year
putting our people through training courses designed
to expand their perspective.
Our mind-set in accounts payable changed so
that we began to get a lot of ideas and a lot of change
coming from the floor. There began to be a lot of
challenging of what was going on and many sugges-
tions for how we could reach our strategic vision. In
cooperation with the other departments involved, the
accounts payable people decided to make some fun-
damental changes in their role and operations.
Instead of thoroughly investigating each discrep-
ancy, no matter how insignificant, before paying the
bill, we decided to go ahead and pay all invoices that
are within a reasonable tolerance. We will adopt a
quality-control approach and keep a history of all
transactions for each vendor so that we can evaluate
the vendor’s performance over time and eliminate
vendors that cause significant problems. Not only
will this result in a significant reduction in work that
is not adding much value, but it will also provide
much better service to our vendors.
We also decided to install a PC-based docu-
ment imaging system and move toward a paperless
environment. We are developing a Document
Control System (DCS) through which most docu-
ments that come into our mail room will be identi-
fied, indexed, and entered through document readers
into the imaging system. Then the documents them-
selves will be filed and their images will be placed
into the appropriate processing queues for the work
that they require. The Document Control System
will allow someone to add notes to the document,
route it from one computer system to another, and
keep track of what has been done to the document.
This will radically change the way we do business in
the department. Things that used to take 18 steps,
going from one clerk to another, will take only 1 or
2 steps because all the required information will be
available through the computer. Not only will this
improve our service, but it will drastically reduce our
processing costs. It will also require that all of our
processing systems be integrated with the Document
Control System.In addition to developing the new Document
Control System, this new accounts payable approach
required CIPI to replace or extensively modify five major
systems: the Freight Audit System (FAST); the
Computerized Invoice Matching System (CIMS), which
audited invoices; the Corporate Approval System (CAS),
which checked that vouchers were approved by author-
ized persons; the vendor database mentioned above; and
the system that dealt with transactions that were not on
computer-generated purchase orders. The PAS project
was originally intended to modify the CIMS system.Systems Development at CIPI
Systems development at CIPI is both centralized and
decentralized. There is a large corporate IS group that has
responsibility for corporate databases and systems. Also,
there are about 30 divisional systems groups. A division
may develop systems on its own, but if a corporate data-
base is affected, then corporate IS must be involved in the
development. Corporate IS also sells services to the divi-
sions. For example, corporate IS will contract to manage
a project and/or to provide all or some of the technical
staff for a project, and the time of these people will be
billed to the division at standard hourly rates.
Similarly, computer operations are both centralized
and decentralized. There is a corporate data center operated
by corporate IS, but there are also computers and LANs that
are operated by the divisions and even by departments.
Corporate IS sets standards for this hardware and the LANs,
and will contract to provide technical support for the LANs.
Because the accounts payable systems affected corpo-
rate financial databases, Anderson had to involve corporate
IS in the development of most of these systems. The
Document Control System (DCS), however, did not directly
affect corporate databases, so Anderson decided to use his
own systems group to develop this imaging system.
Corporate IS had just begun using a structured devel-
opment methodology called Stradis. This methodologyCase Study III-1 • Managing a Systems Development Project at Consumer and Industrial Products, Inc. 433