Proposed ERP for Symantec

Proposed ERP for Symantec

Thesis Statement

This report lays emphasis on the importance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Strategic Asset Management (SAM) in Symantec's approach to their proposed ERP implementation through Project Oasis, and latterly Project Nero.

This paper accents the difference between Symantecal application systems, which are designed to support the entire Symantec against the Managerial Support Systems, which are proposed to provide support accurately for managers. Furthermore, this report's focal point is essentially on the IT applications and their importance within an Symantec and how those applications benefit management's ability to optimize company performance and simultaneously decrease costs. This report is in APA format and uses 5 sources.

Analysis

Symantec Support Systems:

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

ERP attempts to merge into a whole enterprise, i.e.: all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve those entire different departments specific needs.

Every of those departments commonly have its own computer system enhanced for the exact ways that the department does its work. What ERP does is combine them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that there can be centralized level of communication and the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other. This synthesized approach can have an enormous return in respect of money, resources, time and extra effort that employees put in, once the companies use and connect the software correctly.

Let me give you a vivid example to justify the need of ERP in the manager's world and to keep up with the pace. For instance, take a customer order. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and re-keyed into different department's computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse's computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. "You'll have to call the warehouse" is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers. (The ABCs of ERP By Christopher Koch)

ERP overpowers the conventional standalone computer systems in major departments like finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse and simultaneously replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly closes the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors' ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of ...