MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM (MIS)

Management Information System (MIS)

Management Information System (MIS)

Introduction

Over the last two decades, organizations, including small-and-medium size enterprises (SMEs) have moved to implementing some kind of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems are business software packages that enable organizations to:

Integrate their business functions (sales, production, human resources, financial, purchasing, etc.) throughout the enterprise, using integrated application modules based on business processes of best-business practices.

Share common data, information, and knowledge throughout the entire enterprise.

Automate critical parts of its business processes.

Generate and access real-time information using a single database of all basic and transaction data.

As such, ERP systems have emerged as the core of successful data, information, and knowledge management through integrated functional applications across the entire organization. Further, the adoption of ERP systems are becoming more of supporting their businesses under ever changing environment of diminishing market shares, tough competition, ever increasing customer expectations and globalization.

Today's ERP systems have represented for large companies' one of the most relevant areas of investment in IT (Davenport, 1998). Despite these investments and widespread use of ERP systems, many companies are beginning to realize that the real impact of ERP systems on management styles and practices is actually well below expectations, especially on the front of organizational integration (Beretta, 2002). Need for better utilization and performance of enterprise system resources has led to the focus on two main areas: improvements in ERP system implementation aspects and business process improvements over process integration, automation, and optimization within business blueprint of ERP.

Barber et al. (2003), through a comprehensive literature review, show that few tools are available for supporting management of business processes in manufacturing and that, except for a few small-scale processes, BPR implementations in manufacturing have had limited success. Apart from BPR focus, there were significant interests on applications themselves. Themistocleous et al. (2001) identified problems associated with application integration (AI) in ERP systems. Their results confirm that AI, as a new means of system integration, adds value by placing business logic in the applications network. Further, Persona et al. (2004) identified the general requirements and guidelines for the definition of an integrated model of the order to delivery cycle in a Versatile Manufacturing environment. Metaxiotis et al. (2003) proposed a knowledge-based system for production scheduling that could be incorporated as a custom module in an ERP system. Overall, most of research activities on business processes in ERP system are confined narrowly on business process modeling, selected industries or organizations of SME sector(Davenport, 1998,, 121).

Although many BPR projects seem to provide streamlined business processes through waste elimination, simplification, and integration (the first three principles of BPR), process automation and optimization have not been fully incorporated into business blueprint of many ERP systems. Martin and Cheung (2005) demonstrate through a case study that significant improvements through BPR can still be achieved after the implementation of ERP systems. Clegg (2006) proposes a holonic modeling approach based on the application of systems thinking to designing, managing and improving business processes, while Samaranayake (2003) proposes an enhancement ...