Saturday, February 28, 2009

Effective Business and Enhanced Performance


From an Eagle -Eye view, its is realized that most organizations run similar activities but provide different product or services to the consumers, but guided by different operation polices.

The primary activites common to all organizations are as follows:
- Human Resources : Organizations wealth is defined by the competency of the workforce.
- Financial Acitvites : The Financial Position must be handled by the Accounting experts
- Purchases: Irrespective of the operations of the organization, resources must be procured, either tangile or intangible
- Sales: Organizations are established to sell products or services.

For effective business operations and improving the skills of specific employee within the organization, various ERP solutions have being developed and adapted to specific business organizations to enhance business activities such as improving the Supply -Chain processes, Inventory management, Financial Management and reporting system, Human Resource Management Cycle and others, thereby improving customer satifaction and your market share.

Adopting ERP solution into every buisness organization is the way forward.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

ERP & Business Organization

What is ERP?
  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes.

  • ERP is a way to integrate the data and processes of an organization into one single system. Usually ERP systems will have many components including hardware and software, in order to achieve integration, most ERP systems use a unified database to store data for various functions found throughout the organization.
The Ideal ERP System
An ideal ERP system is when a single database is utilized and contains all data for various software modules. These software modules can include:
Manufacturing: Some of the functions include; engineering, capacity, workflow management, quality control, bills of material, manufacturing process, etc.
  • Financials: Accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, general ledger and cash management, etc.
  • Human Resources: Benefits, training, payroll, time and attendance, etc
  • Supply Chain Management: Inventory, supply chain planning, supplier scheduling, claim processing, order entry, purchasing, etc.
  • Projects: Costing, billing, activity management, time and expense, etc.
  • Customer Relationship Management: sales and marketing, service, commissions, customer contact, calls center support, etc.
  • Data Warehouse: Usually this is a module that can be accessed by an organizations customers, suppliers and employees.
Advantages of ERP Systems
There are many advantages of implementing an EPR system; here are a few of them:
  • A totally integrated system
  • The ability to streamline different processes and workflows
  • The ability to easily share data across various departments in an organization
  • Improved efficiency and productivity levels
  • Better tracking and forecasting
  • Lower costs
  • Improved customer service
Disadvantages of ERP Systems
  • Problems with ERP systems are mainly due to inadequate investment in ongoing training for the involved IT personnel - including those implementing and testing changes - as well as a lack of corporate policy protecting the integrity of the data in the ERP systems and the ways in which it is used.
  • Customization of the ERP software is limited.
  • Re-engineering of business processes to fit the "industry standard" prescribed by the ERP system may lead to a loss of competitive advantage.
  • ERP systems can be very expensive (This has led to a new category of "ERP light" solutions)

Material Management (MM)

Objectives At the end of this unit, you should be able to: • Define the key advantages of material management process. • Identify t...