COMPANY REPORT

Company Report



Company Report

Globalization has resulted in increasing competitiveness in today's supply-chain. Such an environment called for greater integration to coordinate with national and international business partners. The term extended enterprise (ERPII) was a new concept introduced by the Gartner Group in 2000 to label the latest extensions to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (Classe, 2001), which includes integration and sharing of accurate information about orders and inventory across the supply-chain, enabled by the newly emerged Internet technologies. However, the ERP acronym has persisted as the most widely used term to describe this wide phenomenon.

ERP evolved from a material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRPII) system (Chung & Snyder, 2000). ERP represents the application of the latest IT to MRPII systems, and it is related to the fundamental techniques of MRP in that if they are used as a production planning and control tool, they follow the same MRP release logic. Therefore, the outputs (i.e., planned order release [POR] schedules) generated from such a tool are identical. Within an ERP system, this will be generated from the production planning (PP) module.

ERP's planning capability could offer substantial gains in productivity, dramatic increases in customer service, much higher inventory turns, and a greater reduction in material costs, if it is used efficiently and is facilitated by necessary support. One of the main functions of ERP is to gather fragmented departmental information into a single, integrated software program that runs off of a single data-base so that a number of departments can easily share information and communicate with each other. In short, ERP is replacing early MRP and MRPII systems. Using the MRP metaphor, it consists of software that integrates front-and back-office information systems within the enterprise.

The common characteristic of the simulation can be summarized as follows: each team will make decisions related to customers and suppliers by forecasting an expected sales and receiving orders, delivering the products, determining pricing strategy, analyzing the cash flows and the expected need for cash, arranging for credit if necessary, using business intelligence and reporting in successive quarters and completing cash-to-cash cycle. The game relies on the information, transactions and reports provided by SAP, an industry-standard enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (Seethamraju, 2008).

The manufacturing game consists of the manufacturing and distribution of muesli cereals. Each company can produce up to six muesli different cereals, each with its own distinct flavor. The six ...