Thursday, October 15, 2009

ERP System in SME Segment:Obligation or Choice




ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a system which integrates various business data in a single database and provides cross function reporting on click of a single button. Earlier ERP was made for large organizations but, now it is made for medium and even for small organizations. In this global competitive market, organizations need to upgrade with latest technologies. Most of the large organizations are using enterprise resource planning system. To deal with those large organization SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) need to work on a similar type of technologies. In this case, importance of ERP system for SMEs increases. Of course, there are lots of business benefits of enterprise software. Apart from all other basic benefits, enterprise software gives an information system with three important capabilities i.e. 1. Consistency and reliability of business data across the organization2. Streamlined transaction processing within and outside organization3. Provides operations level reporting on a click of a button These capabilities, basic and important as they are, ensure that organizations are ready for specific solutions that improve overall performance. The areas that will increase the basic ERP requirements are like supply chain management (SCM) with electronic collaboration between supplier and customer, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), product data management, complete product life cycle (PLC) management, inventory and warehouse management using RFID tools. For these applications, ERP system becomes the substratum, a kind of gateway to expert functions. That is, enterprise software is a sine qua non for other applications. In fact, the latest trend is that with basic enterprise resource planning software, tailor-made system is given by ERP companies. ERP vendors are speeding-up to integrate most of these additional capabilities. This type of customized or tailor-made enterprise system is easy to install and implement for SMEs. It also takes less time to implement and chances of implementation failure are lesser.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Understanding SAP & ERP


Most of the time you hear the word ‘ERP’ along with SAP. So what is ERP and what is SAP?
Here is a small description for them.
*** What is ERP? ****ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.Enterprise Resource Planning systems integrate all data and processes of an organization into unified system.The key feature of an ERP system is it uses a single or unified database to store data for the various system modules.Various Modules which comes under ERP are listed below:
a. Manufacturing
b. Supply Chain
c. Financials
d. CRM
e. Human Resources
f. Warehouse management
*** What is SAP? ****SAP stands for Systems Applications and Products in data processing.SAP is the 4th largest software company in the world. It ranks after Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.SAP Head quarters are in Walldorf, Germany. SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM engineers.
SAP released SAP R/2 version initially. The architecture of R/2 system is Mainframe architecture.Later SAP R/3 is released which is different from R/2 architecture. R stands for Real time. 3 stands for 3 tier architecture.There are over 100,800 installations at more than 28,000 companies.
SAP products are used by 12 million people in more than 120 countries.
But how good is SAP for SME's wait for the next post.....