Tibmer Jack Essay Example for Free

Tibmer Jack Essay Timberjack was the world’s leading manufacturer of heavy equipment for the professional logger, with an overall market share of 25%. In 1995, Timberjack had 1,600 employees, generated sales of 627 MM USD and a net profit of 88 MM USD. Industry Background In the past the forests were cut manually using the chain saws, and the cut logs were taken out of the forest using horses. The logs were cut as per the requirements manually. But in the twentieth century this started transitioning, and in 1960-1990s there was surge in the use of machinery in forest cutting, loading etc. Timberjack, Blount, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Valmet were the companies providing machinery for cutting forests. Timberjack was the company catering to the 25% of the market share. Product Offering As the old manual chain saw methods for cutting trees were disappearing, feller bunchers, skidders, delimbers and log loaders were used instead. Timberjack provided a variety of heavy equipment that served the new method of cutting trees. The price of these equipment was well attached to pulp and lumber prices which in turn are highly dependent on the on the overall strength of the economy Timberjack follows a series of steps to select and decide its future manufacturing software package. The process is straightforward, which goes through DFP, vendor list, narrow down vendor list, site visit and implementation consulting for the final two vendors. Basically, Timberjack is taking one step after another throughout the processes. While it might not be a perfectly precise analogy of system development life cycle, it does share characteristics with the traditional waterfall model of SDLC (system development life cycle). A typical process of traditional SDLC is usually comprised of the following steps: 1. Project planning, feasibility study 2. Systems analysis, requirements definition 3. Systems design 4. Implementation 5. Integration and testing 6. Acceptance, installation, deployment 7. Maintenance In Timberjacks case, the life cycle starts with the decision from headquarter that a unified software package will be implemented for the whole organization, even for distributed locations. During this phase, the organization identified its current short coming of the existing solution and the necessity to move to a new system, as well as cost-benefit implications and a rough schedule. A decision of ;to build or to buy; has also been reached, which is to buy. During the second phase of the SDLC, there are various types of implementation model. According to Timberjack, it seems that it is following a waterfall model which characterizes with a prolonged need analysis phase. Once a whole list of function requirement is made, it is hardly changed later on. As a matter of fact, Timberjack devoted major time and investment into this phase. The RFP spanned nearly as long as four months and cost 75,000 USD. Although the RFP was treated as valuable outcome, the effort was less appreciated by the Sweden operations because they were in need of a quick replacement of their current software system. The following steps of SDLC, including system design, implementation and etc will depend on which vendor Timberjack eventually selected. Therefore, again, Timberjack took the time evaluated and investigated extensively. Timberjack considered several key metrics that were: cost, time of development and deployment, flexibility of customization and etc. Using the criteria, Timberjack was able to narrow down the vendor list to two bidders. With further review and consideration, Timberjack would finally be able to locked down one vendor that suited best to their situation.