Enterprise Systems Implementations Assignment Sample

Increasing Importance of Enterprise Systems in The World of Business

Abstract of Importance of Enterprise Systems

 With increasing competition in global markets, it becomes extremely crucial that companies stay abreast with the latest technologies that will help them advance their business. For this they need the aid of software application systems. These software application systems are referred to as enterprise systems and they are slowly becoming a crucial part of any project management. In this report, we will study the various implication of having deployed an adequate enterprise system and the effect it has on the output and cross organizational abilities of a large firm. Often the enterprise systems that are implemented by companies fail, but how this company managed to successfully implement with proper planning and analysis will be analysed through literature review.

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Main Body.

Conclusion

References.

Introduction to Importance of Enterprise Systems

It was in the 1990’s that the concept of enterprise systems came into reality. The existence of various informational system problems presented a prolonged quandary for many companies. All these companies understood and estimated the need for complete change in which they run their operations. The success of the company being reviewed for this report is based on customer focused solutions. For their rival companies and the existing market, the regular consulting firms were turning out to be a rather expensive affair. The incoming onslaught of enterprise systems promised much better speed and reduced costs that could help the businesses. But this was during a time when no company has figured out the definite operational advantage of such an innovative application software.

The company in question (XYZ) was a medium sized manufacturing firm that turned its business around by being a pioneer in the field of investing in a good enterprise system. By deploying and enterprise system, XYZ revamped its business to produce significant returns and reduced the workload on its managers and employees. What used to be a difficult endeavour when it came to arranging all the date of the company to give a wide view, was now easily solved as the application systems took the fragments and integrated the information to give an accurate overall picture. This helped them in making wide set decisions for the betterment of company operations while ensuring that the same information was made accessible to all company members and employees

Main Body of Importance of Enterprise Systems

1. For any large firm or enterprise describe the nature of the Enterprise Systems that the organization adopted to improve or maintain operational efficiency, improve customer/supplier intimacy, improve decision making, create new products, services and business models (i.e. to innovate) and to gain a competitive advantage

The key principle that the company XYZ followed was the fact that they were driven by a consumer-focused idea, which implies that they needed an enterprise system that helped them provide products to its customers at a faster and a cheaper rate (Das et al., 2020). Now this was very crucial for them as earlier they had been the best in the market. The company’s lead time in creating the product was four weeks (Das et al., 2020). But soon they were losing their key competitive advantage as their competition was also improving their lead time.

Then the company decided to set a target, the new target meant that they had to design a new lead time, which was two weeks. To facilitate this, they need an arsenal of comprehensive solutions to their operational shortcomings. But before the introduction of the aforementioned enterprise system, this task was insurmountable as transportation of information from one system to another was presented as a mammoth task (Gao et al., 2019). The only solution to this would be the unification of all company data to create seamlessness in operations. Instead of waiting for the market to present solutions in its own sweet time the company decided to opt for SAP’s R/3 system (Goldbeck et al., 2019). Their main objective was to not lose their key competitive advantage and find a system solution in a short period of time. This would require a complete overhaul of the systems that had existed before. The company had been started in the 70’s, so they had almost 5 major systems and 9 interfaces from the beginning to the end of all the processes. The company decided that they needed to eliminate this excessive compilation of duplicate date in order to speed up the process. As their rial companies were also catching up to speed, it was elemental that XYZ step up immediately to continue its domination and edge pf the existing markets.

But as the company required complete access for complete operational access to all the functional departments running the company, permission would prove to be necessary. They needed the complete co operation and faith of the board so as to prevent any interruption in the assimilation of the application software (Kudo et al., 2017). It was crucial that all the areas, agree to this because even if one area refused to cooperate, the idea and functionality of the entire process would fall through and the company would not be able to achieve a new lead time. The steering committee that was set up for this sole purpose, provided the team with enough drive, faith and commitment so that they could make sure that the whole process happened seamlessly. Important feedback revamped lead times and customer services were the key points to be noted (Mocker & Boochever, 2020). It was also decided that the company team would meet every week until the plan went on floor to analyse in detail the day by day implications of deploying this new application software that promised to integrate all the company date and make it accessible through one part.

Customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning are the two major parts of any high functioning enterprise system. The company who decided to go forth with an application software to aid its project management, must decide how they wish to serve their customers. Outcome based objectives are important but ultimately, they are driven by the needs of the customer and the wants of the market. And this is exactly how customer relationship with the company effects the resource management of the company. The company has to do a risk analysis as well develop a comprehensive understanding of it consumer relations on a regular basis to decide what exactly it wishes to derive out of the equation. Any company that knows its target consumer base well will be able to organise a project management plan that enables it employees to provide the best services possible (Hovelja et al., 2020). Through sales, service, marketing and customer support, the in-depth data prediction made by the application software can completely change the effect a company has on the market.

And with increasing competition it becomes even more necessary to do things in a way that are technologically efficient and in trend. XYZ was able to understand the need of the hour and bring in a system that would increase it desirability in the market exponentially as ultimately, they were able to provide their consumers with services of unprecedented levels of excellence.

 Another indispensable arena of concern for a manufacturing firm is the data about supply chain management. Configuring the new systems and migrating all the old data was incorporated seamlessly by the XYZ team. This refers to the management of flow of goods and services through the various channels in company. It involves the panning controlling and implementing of operations. This is how a company’s analyses its existing methods to help in speeding up delivery and order fulfilment.

 In the case of XYZ, the most important thing was scope management. In this process of implementation, they had to decide what procedures were necessary in order to improve their operational behaviour. An ideal enterprise system, also known enterprise resource planning system is succinctly cross functional enough as an information system to help companies access data in real time at a single point (Hintsch & Turowski, 2019) This sector wide coordination and integration is essential for a company like XYZ. From sale to production, Manufacturing to logistics and human resources all of this contribute towards the operational activities (Zhao et al., 2018).Mapping, selecting a framework, adapting and adjusting to the framework, operationalising the new framework, updating existing business modules, learning to harness the new opted methods for maximum profits are the important steps that XYZ had to follow in order to effectively change their lead time and continue their competitive edge over the rest of the market.

2.Identify all risks including the dependencies on the firm’s supply chain that could affect or disrupt operations on the supply chain.

Opting for an enterprise system can be a completely transformational exercise for a firm as its implications are not just financial and strategic but also cultural and will affect the company’s organisation (Kale, 2018). For a company like XYZ, an important question was deciding just how much uniformity the company aspired for across all its factories all over the world. Standardizing the transmission for information was not just a protocol to be followed by top level executives but also all the workers at every level and employees across the regions. By giving access to all of them and even customers in such case they want to ensure broader access to operational information (Liu et al., 2020). In case of a firm such as XYZ, a move like this that works towards standardizing information on every level provides an immeasurable advantage as it sets the bar for the rest of the branches of the company.

 By taking necessary measures to streamline the global financial and administration process across different regions, XYZ was able to introduce a global lean production model that helped them achieve their targets in record time all across the world.

Supply chain management includes the proper and integrated planning, mapping and execution to make sure that the flow of the materials information and capital is optimized in the company (Sumner, 2018). From demand planning to logistics sourcing, collecting data, delivering, inventory management, sourcing storage and transportation- all of these come under supply chain management. XYZ used both supply chain management, business strategy and application software to continue their competitive edge over their rivals.

 All of the tactics involved in supply chain management revolve around the logistics of procuring information about products that can be offered to their customers. Regular supply chain would include all the steps from sourcing the raw materials to ordering them and tracking the shipments. The chain also includes surveying and tracking the products that are being manufactured /assembly and shipped out to customers. An ideal supply chain system would be automated, as in it would take care of all the process on it own whilst maintaining the efficiency in every department as the process continues.

Every business needs financial support to run all its operational activities. Hence , the availability of enough funding and capital, liquidity and asset management is extremely essential along with prevention od disruption in technological to ensure that the company can achieve its goals (Parast, 2020). XYZ made sure that its supply chain had all the strength it needed.one of their key policies was implementing policies to maintain the treasury in order to offer solution in case of any potential financial risk.

The risks that XYZ potentially faced were the delay in delivery of raw materials or their procurement, often strained supplier relations or the potential of the same, ineptitude of workers in following industry specific compliances and regulation when it came to operational methods in the supply chain and service disruptions during company service hours.

3.Provide an assessment of how successful the adoption of the enterprise Systems was to reduce friction on the supply chain, i.e. to maintain operational efficiency, and a discussion of any success metrics that were used.

Reconstruction of its IT infrastructure is the most elemental and arguably the toughest task when it comes to incorporation new enterprise system software’s. XYZ was an old company and most of its employees were not aware of the many implications of this overhaul (Zhang et al., 2020). Just deciding on a module was not enough, XYZ had to assess how relevant it was and measure its utility effectively. Installation of new technology in its physical outlets has its own repercussions.

Other than this, XYZ’s responses to its prevalent disruptions also helped them manage their supply chain in a more effective manner. This in turn improved their abilities to proactively control their supply management chain.

XYZ ‘s core focus as on data, what the market was telling them about their products. So that they could manufacture goods in a more efficient manner (Riegger et al., 2018). Also having the information about their raw materials, and the logistics of the whole process prevented them from avoiding any delays.

 It is true, that in the case of operational procedures in the supply chain. Only data can help mitigate the risks.one of the risk could also be congested markets and increasing competition (Shan et al., 2018). Competition from rivals when it comes to procuring data can also be one of the complications.

But the complete upheaval of the organisational structure is what turned out to be the more challenging aspect. XYZ had to convince all of its employees, at every level to adapt to the new technology in order to increase their outcome and help the company portfolio. Doing so without any disruption in service, production and customer service was one of the main things they had to keep in mind.

Conclusion on Importance of Enterprise Systems

There are so many ways in which the incorporation of enterprise systems helped XYZ enhance its business model to serve its customers better. By scaling up in terms of resources increasing the reliability if the infrastructure. Making all the data across all the plants accessible at one place so that they could uniformly conduct their reformed operations helped them immensely. By avoiding the delay in relay of information major errors could be fixed and this was only possible because of the technical support these enterprise systems offer. In this situation, we can learn that enterprise system was in fact an excellent way to come up for solution for business problems. The implementation of an enterprise system is a strategic function that affects all parts and processes in a business, and affects the service to the customer. This kind of insight due to fast relay of information saved them a lot of time and eliminated the duplication of data. This provided them with immense opportunity for growth and catapulted them to the heights of success. The company specifically set goals and worked towards them and that is how they became the pioneers in promoting the incorporation of enterprise systems into project management through their success models.

References for Importance of Enterprise Systems

Das, S., Mishra, M., & Mohanty, P. K. (2020). Testing the Moderation Effects on Gartner’s Customer Relationship Management Practices and Customer Acquisition. In Innovation, Technology, and Market Ecosystems (pp. 333-345). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Gao, P., Xiao, X., Li, Z., Jee, K., Xu, F., Kulkarni, S. R., & Mittal, P. (2019). A query system for efficiently investigating complex attack behaviors for enterprise security. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 12(12), 1802-1805.

Goldbeck, N., Angeloudis, P., & Ochieng, W. (2020). Optimal supply chain resilience with consideration of failure propagation and repair logistics. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 133, 101830.

Hintsch, J., & Turowski, K. (2019, June). Enterprise Computing: A Case Study on Current Practices in SAP Operations. In International Conference on Business Information Systems (pp. 124-135). Springer, Cham.

Hovelja, T., Vasilecas, O., & Kalibatienė, D. (2020). Evaluating organizational characteristics complementary with enterprise software products. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 21(3), 890-913.

Kale, V. (2018). Enterprise Process Management Systems: Engineering Process-Centric Enterprise Systems using BPMN 2.0. CRC Press.

Kudo, T., Ito, Y., & Serizawa, Y. (2017). An application of mongodb to enterprise system manipulating enormous data. Int, Journal of Informatics Society, 9(3), 97-108.

Liu, D., Shen, J., Vijayakumar, P., Wang, A., & Zhou, T. (2020). Efficient data integrity auditing with corrupted data recovery for edge computing in enterprise multimedia security. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 1-20.

Mocker, M., & Boochever, J. O. (2020). How to Avoid Enterprise Systems Landscape Complexity. MIS Quarterly Executive, 19(1).

Parast, M. M. (2020). The impact of R&D investment on mitigating supply chain disruptions: Empirical evidence from US firms. International Journal of Production Economics, 227, 107671.

Riegger, C., Vinçon, T., & Petrov, I. (2018, November). Efficient data and indexing structure for blockchains in enterprise systems. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (pp. 173-182).

Shan, H., Li, Y., & Shi, J. (2020). Influence of Supply Chain Collaborative Innovation on Sustainable Development of Supply Chain: A Study on Chinese Enterprises. Sustainability, 12(7), 2978.

Sumner, M. (2018). ERP Project Retrospectives—55 Enterprise Systems: Evaluating Project Success, Lessons Learned, and Business Outcomes. Midwest Association for Information Systems, 12-23.

Zhang, J., Xuan, X., Xu, Z., & Shao, X. (2020, January). The Distribution Network Operation Online Monitoring and Analysis System of State Grid Corporation (Phase 5). In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 719, No. 1, p. 012013). IOP Publishing.

Zhao, H., Zhao, H., & Guo, S. (2018). Operational Efficiency of Chinese Provincial Electricity Grid Enterprises: An Evaluation Employing a Three-Stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Model. Sustainability, 10(9), 3168.

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