Powerit Case Study Essay

In business, it is important for companies to be able to communicate effectively. Each department of a company relies on the other departments as they add to the value chain. One way for a company to integrate its different departments is enterprise resource planning. ERPs are software programs that allow companies to join together data across operations on a company wide basis (Jessup and Valacich 248). ERPs store company information in a common database and allow all departments to access it from one central location (Koch). Companies without ERPS may contain many legacy systems, each operating with different

ERP projects are most definitely expensive and risky, nevertheless despite these potential costs KEDA decided to embark on its ERP implementation project in hopes of obtaining a high return on investment. One of the factors that led to this decision was the fierce competition of global and local competitors. In an effort to retain its position within the industry and combat the threat of other businesses, KEDA needed to evolve. Specifically, through choosing a new ERP system, KETA hoped that this strategy would improve operations and become a productive advancement to the structure of the company. Since the Chinese government stopped their support and the MRP-II couldn’t manage the multiple system operations, they had to seek out a new alternative.

Today Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is extensively adopted by many organizations regardless of kind and size, mainly because it provides enterprise-wide view of information across all their business operations and help organizations achieve consistency across all their functional departments. The potential benefits of ERP system implementation include improved coordination across functional areas, increased efficiency, reduced operational costs, rapid access to information for decision making, managerial control and support for strategic planning.

In all facets of business, it is certain that a properly implemented ERP system will help save labor, resources, and overhead. The system will aid in discovering unneeded labor and misuse of the organization 's resources. It will help optimize the businesses ' processes. For instance, the human resources department is able to identify the necessary level of laabor to accommodate an unexpected change in customer demant as soon as a sales spike occurs. These types of decisions can be made on the spot and this can rid the organization of communication difficulties during times of crisis (ERPwire.com).

Making decision of what to select between “best of breed” and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are never easy. There are many controversy or chaos issues surrounds this thought and debate. Which one is better? What factors need to be considered? This paper will address the difference between “best of breed” and ERP System that needs to be considered, such as the definition, advantages and disadvantages each of them.

Enterprise Resource Programming, or similar systems, have become a major part of a company’s tool set. Because of the fast pace of today’s society, the business environment has to struggle continuously in order to keep up. ERP enables companies to accomplish that by creating a “one stop shop” for all of the company’s vital information. This gives a business the ability to streamline the process of getting the item in question from the factory to the customer as quickly as possible.

ERP systems not only differ by the size of businesses but also by industry in the sense that different industries use different ERP software’s.

Company A being a leading value added distributor for Telecom hardware platform and services in APAC can benefit largely from the implementation of an ERP system. The ERP system will be their business management tool to assist them to use a system of applications which are integrated to manage their regular activities. The ERP system will incorporate all aspects of the entire organization including finance and accounting, human resources, manufacturing and supply chain management, project management, customer relationship management, data services and control of access ADDIN EN.CITE Wallace2001619(Wallace & Kremzar, 2001)6196196Wallace, T.F.Kremzar, M.H.ERP: making it happen : the implementers' guide to success with enterprise resource planning2001New YorkWiley9780471392019http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=Wa3vIn5DKc8C( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_10" o "Wallace, 2001 #619" Wallace & Kremzar, 2001).

An ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, system is a business management software that integrates all levels of operations. It can include product planning, development, manufacturing, sales and marketing. The goal of a successful ERP is to improve the flow of all shared information and data across the entire organization. In the past, Johnson & Johnson have used an ERP developed by SAP, a German multinational software company and one of the worlds largest. More recently J&J took on a massive project to consolidate and harmonize their ERP landscape. J&J 's global enterprise supply chain included 120 manufacturing sites, over 500 external manufacturers, 450 distribution centers, and over 60 ERP systems that support about 275 operating companies (Dignan, 2013). This project was initiated because J&J was finding that they were having trouble keeping some products on shelves which affected sales. They saw an opportunity to better meet the evolving needs of customers and hopefully improve the cost of goods sold efficiently to

The success of any business lies in effective communication and proper data exchange within internal departments. Delayed in latest information is a remarkable obstacle in failure of any business. To overcome this problem, a proficient solution "ERP" came into existence. The vast tool, capable of integrating internal business processes of any organization, is so called termed as Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP is an approach of amalgamating the various departments of an enterprise such as Sales, HR, Finance, Marketing, Production, Warehouse, etc. The single source where internal departments can share and access information quickly is ERP. In actual, ERP is a wide centralized database where all the inter-departmental data is stored. It is capable of performing multiple operations in a single time and can be used by various enterprise units at the same time.

Alpha Enterprises understands that implementing an ERP system may force the reengineering of key business processes and/or developing new business processes to support the organizations goals. Also, ERP implementation requires a massive change in an organization’s structure and affects the way people use to do work and interact. Alpha Enterprises must carefully plan a transformation that is based on adequate strategy and well defined methodology and processes of implementation. The resulting changes may significantly affect organizational structures, policies, processes, and employees.

ERP has become a potential solution which the companies are aiming for to improve their business process performances. There are various challenges that are encountered by the organizations in terms of people, process and systems oriented issues in the usage of disparate systems. In aim of increasing their business operations, the companies are eying at ERP as potential solutions. In this research paper the focus is upon understanding how ERP can be resourceful and few case outlooks has been discussed on the successful implementation and the potential benefits the organizations could gain.

* In today’s dynamic and highly competitive marketplace, it can seriously hinder productivity, profitability, and growth. The primary reason an ERP solution is so vital to a company’s success is efficiency. Cumbersome, error-prone, labor-intensive manual processes can drain both time and money. Businesses must operate as lean as possible in order to keep the bottom line in check, and failing to automate critical yet routine business activities makes it nearly

Due to dramatic changes in organisational management, technology plays an important role in today business environment. According to Groomer & Murthy (1989) incorporation of information technology solutions are becoming increasingly important for all businesses in order to operate successfully. One way that many businesses have implemented information technology on a large scale (Groomer & Murthy, 1989) is by setting up Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to achieve their business transaction and data processing needs. According to the business need, selecting the appropriate information system such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP) will be appropriate and suitable because it improves efficiency. However it should be borne in mind that every business has its own dimension; therefore, there is the dire need of appropriate selection and need based customizations (Kleiner et al., 1999).

For our research project we interviewed subjects who work all over the globe with companies having millions of dollars in revenue. The subjects have worked extensively with ERP applications, implementations and maintenance with more than 5 years of working experience in this field. Out of these 5 companies researched, 3 of the companies are in the IT sector, 1 is a manufacturing company and 1 is an energy company. Hence, our report contains views covering various domains which implement ERP. All the companies use a streamlined business process which is built around customer requirements, company strategy and which use the company’s resources to the fullest potential. Electronic documentation is used as