Examice

Scenario:

You are serving as the Lead Enterprise Architect at a major supplier in the automotive industry. The company is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio with manufacturing plants across the United States, Brazil, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Each of these plants has been operating its own planning and production scheduling systems, as well as custom developed applications that drive the automated production equipment at each plant.

The company is implementing lean manufacturing principles to minimize waste and improve the efficiency of all of its production operations. During a recent exercise held for internal quality improvement, it was determined that a significant reduction in process waste could be achieved by replacing the current planning and scheduling systems with a common Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system located in the Cleveland data center. This central system would provide support to each of the plants replacing the functionality in the existing systems. It would also eliminate the need for full data centers at each of the plant facilities. A reduced number of IT staff could support the remaining applications. In some cases, a third-party contractor could provide those staff.

The Enterprise Architecture department has been operating for several years and has mature, well-developed architecture governance and development processes that are strongly based on TOGAF 9.

At a recent meeting, the Architecture Board approved a Request for Architecture Work sponsored by the Chief Engineer of Global Manufacturing Operations. The request covered the initial architectural investigations and the development of a comprehensive architecture to plan the transformation.

The Common ERP Deployment architecture project team has now been formed, and the project team has been asked to develop an Architecture Vision that will achieve the desired outcomes and benefits. Some of the plant managers have expressed concern about the security and reliability of diving their planning and production scheduling from a remote centralized system. The Chief Engineer wants to know how these concerns can be addressed.

During the initial meeting of the Common ERP Deployment architecture project team, a number of alternative recommendations for how to proceed are put forward by members of the team.

You have been asked to select the most appropriate recommendation to ensure that the team evaluates different approaches to the problem and clarifies the requirements for the architecture.

Based on TOGAF 9, which of the following is the best answer?

The team should develop Baseline and Target Architectures for each of the manufacturing plants, ensuring that the views corresponding to selected viewpoints address key concerns of the stakeholders. A consolidated gap analysis between the architectures will then be used to validate the approach, and determine the capability increments needed to achieve the target state.

The team should exercise due diligence and carefully research vendor literature and conduct a series of briefings with vendors that are on the current approved supplier list. Based on the findings from the research, the team should define a preliminary Architecture Vision. The team should then use that model to build consensus among the key stakeholders.

The team should use stakeholder analysis to understand who has concerns about the initiative. The team should then hold a series of interviews at each of the manufacturing plants using the business scenario technique. This will then enable them to identify and document the key high-level stakeholder requirements for the architecture.

The team should conduct a pilot project that will enable vendors on the short list to demonstrate potential solutions that will address the concerns of the stakeholders. Based on the findings of that pilot project, a complete set of retirements will be developed that will drive the evolution of the architecture.