ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) TECHNOLOGY

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technology

1.

Identify the factors that affect the success of ERP implementation strategies in organizations.

Answer: An ERP system is not only the integration of various organization processes. Any system has to possess few key characteristics to qualify for a true ERP solution. These features are:

Flexibility: An ERP system should be flexible to respond to the changing needs of an enterprise. The client server technology enables ERP to run across various database back ends through Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC). Modular & Open: ERP system has to have open system architecture. This means that any module can be interfaced or detached whenever required without affecting the other modules. It should support multiple hardware platforms for the companies having heterogeneous collection of systems. It must support some third party add-ons also. (Burn, 2007)

Comprehensive: It should be able to support variety of organizational functions and must be suitable for a wide range of business organizations.

Beyond The Company: It should not be confined to the organizational boundaries, rather support the on-line connectivity to the other business entities of the organization.

Best Business Practices: It must have a collection of the best business processes applicable worldwide.

Simulation of Reality: Last but not the least; it must simulate the reality of business processes on the computers. In no way it should have the control beyond the business processes and it must be able to assign accountabilities to the users controlling the system.

The existing trends warrant doing some thing extra to survive, thrive and beat the competition in today's cruelly competitive world one had to manage the future. Managing the future means managing the information. In order to manage the information, in order to bring high quality information to the decision makers at the right time, in order to automate the process of data collection, collation and refinement, organizations have to make Information Technology an ally and should tie together its full prospective and employ it in the best mode and technique. The organizations are turning to some sort of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package as a solution to their information management problems. ERP packages if chosen correctly, implemented judiciously and used efficiently will raise the productivity and profits of companies radically. But many a company fails in this because of wrong product, incompetent and haphazard implementation and incompetent or ineffective practice. (Schwartz, 2008)

Application of enterprise includes strong demand for professional services in all walks of industry, not always translated into big profits for these firms. They tend to have a devil of a time managing their utilization rates and project-staffing levels, bringing in work on time and within budget, and controlling their spiraling bid-development costs.

However, for this one nook of the global economy, help is finally on the way, in the form of a new, vertically oriented enterprise application. Several innovative enterprise resource planning (ERP) upstarts—including Evolve, Info Scope, Loon Technologies and Novient—are offering packages that address the specific business-management needs of professional-services ...