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558 Part Four Building and Managing Systems

collected, what systems and reports they used with the data, and what they
wanted in the future. These face-to-face meetings sensitized the project team
to the regional differences in information requirements and corporate culture.
The meetings also gave end users a stronger sense of ownership in the project
and the belief that the project team was dedicated to making the new system
work for their benefit.
The project team used a phased implementation approach for each global
region. In 2011, Nu Skin went live with the SAP ERP HCM global functional-
ity. Benefits were immediate. In the past, if the finance department needed
a report on the number of full-time employees in a specific market, the Nu
Skin HR department had to request the information from the local operating
unit, which could take weeks. A report about which employees transferred
to another department or left the company had to be manually created by
gathering the required data from the various regions and manually sending
the report to the different departments. Now all of these reports are automati-
cally generated and distributed by the system.
Sources: ”Nu Skin Fights Aging Systems with New HR Software,”SAP Insider Profiles January
2012; “Nu Skin: Invigorating the Customer Interaction Experience,” www.sap.com, accessed
November 8, 2012; and www.nuskin.com, accessed November 8, 2012.
ne of the principal challenges posed by information systems is
Oensuring they deliver genuine business benefits. There is a very
high failure rate among information systems projects because organizations
have incorrectly assessed their business value or because firms have failed
to manage the organizational change surrounding the introduction of new
technology.
Nu Skin’s management realized this when it implemented its HR system.
The new system involved an enterprise-wide change in HR business
processes supported by new software. Nu Skin succeeded in this project
because its management clearly understood that attention to organiza-
tional “people” issues was essential for success, especially in a multinational
company with numerous regional and cultural differences.
The chapter-opening diagram calls attention to important points raised
by this case and this chapter. Nu Skin desperately needed to automate its
HR processes, which had been entirely manual and made operations highly
inefficient. Management wisely selected a project team whose members had
both business and technical expertise. The team took great care and time to
identify the right software solution and to elicit user information requirements.
Staging the system implementation and conducting employee training at each
location further contributed to success.
Here are some questions to think about: Why was it important to have
representatives from both HR and IT on the project team? What were the risk
factors in this project?

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