Project Management: Nestle And Brady Corporation

1. Introduction

Nestlé is the largest food and beverage company in the world. The company’s turnover is around $76 billion and more than 253 million employees at 500 facilities in 80 countries in 2004. Brady Corporation is one of the oldest and most successful global manufacturer, which headquartered in Milwaukee and serves more than 500 million customers worldwide in electronics, telecommunications, manufacturing, electrical and other industries (whbrady.com, 2004).

The objectives of this portfolio are firstly, to show the basic information of Nestlé and Brady Corporation. Furthermore, comparing these two organizations from three aspects, including best practices or bad practices, the principles of Project Management each company has been

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system integrates key business and management functions and provides an opinion of the happenings in the company, in the areas of finance, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain and so on (James and Wolf, 2000). Furthermore, according to Mabert et al. (2002), SAP has been identified as one of the Top Five ERP software and leader with more than 50 percent of the market. According to Lauren (2004, p.37), Project Management is “the process of the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements”. Moreover, Wideman (2003) states that there are seven principles of project management, such as commitment, success, tetrad trade-off, strategy, management, single-point responsibility and cultural environment

Firstly, both of them cooperated with SAP and then developed a standard information system, so they fulfilled the commitment principle, meanwhile an equitable commitment exists between the provider of resources and the project delivery team. Secondly, both of them applied success principle. It is axiomatic that the goal of project management is to be successful, after implementing good practices Nestlé and Brady achieved their own projects. Last but not the list, both of them executed strategy principle, ensuring the projects in a focused set of sequential and progressive phases (Wideman, 2003). Nestlé as an example, the strategies consist of develop a “best practice” business processes and create a set of standard database, the company fist planning and then doing to fulfill its strategy principle. On the other hand, only Nestlé applied the cultural environment principle. To fulfill this principle, the company taken the risk of corporate culture into their consideration to make sure that each local market dealt with their local customers and a different approach will be required when taken with other