Question: Maryland's largest private employer, Johns Hopkins Institutions (JHI), has more than 45,000 full-time staff members at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Johns Hopkins University, and several other hospitals and institutions. To improve data quality and reporting, JHI decided to use a centralized ERP system instead of several different business applications that were not fully integrated. Getting an overall view of JHI's operations and performance was difficult with these different applications. JHI faced technical challenges in adopting an ERP system. To overcome these challenges, it chose BearingPoint's SAP applications with
IBM Power 570 servers as the hardware platform. JHI also decided to use server clusters to make the system more fault tolerant, and it installed a storage area network (SAN) for high performance. The ERP system now provides a centralized method of gathering information for the entire organization.16
Answer the following questions:
1. What was the main reason for using an ERP system at JHI?
2. How did the ERP system that JHI adopted help address technical challenges?
3. What did the ERP system achieve at JHI?