ERP systems

ERP systems are expanding in just about any industry. Are you ready to position yourself as one of the leaders in the multi-faceted expansion of business models?

An ERP software package helps organisations in effective and efficient management of available resources such as machines, material, manpower, inventory, etc. A unified database serves the needs and requirements of various departments, leading to optimised functioning. The aim of a business in using an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is to bring all its departments to a common platform, such that the departments can easily share information and communicate with each other.

To elaborate, in ERP, a single software package has modules customised to the needs of different departments-financial accounting, production, distribution, marketing, inventory control, data warehousing, etc. ERP is, in sum, an application for effective and efficient management of the resources of an organisation.

Let's say the human resources department keeps a record of the attendance, performance on the job, contribution, and such for every employee. A software module will keep these records and save it in a unified database. When the employees are to be remunerated, the finance department uses the same database for calculating the employee's salary after the necessary costs, rates, and taxes have been applied.

ERP systems have been used for ages, and software packages provided by the vendors have undergone several changes. Today, ERP is used by large corporations as well as small-and-medium businesses; almost every sector has some form of ERP implemented.

The Opportunities
Earlier, ERP was confined to the manufacturing sectors. Its success led to a further demand for it in industries such as automobiles, media, pharmaceuticals, textiles, telecom, heavy machines, and many more.

"The growth of ERP as a business solution has fuelled the adoption of upcoming technologies and implementation of ERP packages in several companies across various industries. This has also spawned the growth of IT consultant firms that specialise in helping organisations both in India and abroad in implementing ERP solutions. It also requires organisations where ERP has been adopted to develop teams for ongoing maintenance of the applications and providing support to clients," says Jason Gonsalves, Vice President, IT and Corporate Planning, Kansai Nerolac Paints, a leading paint manufacturing company.

The implementation of ERP passes through a number of stages-analysis of the business process, the drawing up of plans for the ERP, installing and configuring the ERP package, and, finally, support and management.

Thus, the demand for ERP professionals is, naturally, in companies who have adopted or are planning to adopt ERP applications. There are several options for those who have specialised knowledge in this field-through either education or work experience. The increase in adoption of ERP by various industry verticals has led to an increase in demand for trained, skilled, and experienced ERP professionals.

ChemWeek IT Forum WRAP-UP

Last Monday, I attended the 11th Annual ChemWeek IT Forum in King of Prussia, PA.

Unfortunately, the attendance was light for the conference, but the presenters all hung in there and delivered quality content. The presentations are posted here for your review. Reading the slide decks won't be the same as being there, but you should get a good understanding of the topics discussed.

I enjoyed Michael Boster's (CIO of Vertellus) talk on IP protection. He provided a nice framework for addressing IP protection, and shared a real story that drove the point home. Understandably, some companies are hesitant about sharing anything related to IP protection. But real stories advance real understanding of what can happen and it benefits the community as a whole. Michael did a nice job with this topic.

Andrea Kirk also did a really nice job on the knowledge management story at Rohm and Haas. Her presentation style added some much needed energy into the room. One of her themes was to simplify the IT environment. Simplification makes it much easier for the users to know where to get work done and store documents, and it makes it much easier for IT to apply standardized governance and compliance controls on key information. The Microsoft approach for this is called infrastructure optimization.

Colin Masson and I presented ways which chemical companies innovate off of their IT foundation. Many of the large chemical companies have a solid ERP implementation - likely on SAP. With this foundation in place, we are seeing investments shift away from core ERP back into other areas including manufacturing & engineering, supply chain, sales & marketing and R&D. Most of the analysts would agree on this shift - though there is certainly some debate over how much is flowing into the different buckets.

Regardless, Colin and I talked about the new focus of investment, mainly in maximizing the value of the ERP implementation. This includes capabilities such as collaboration, mobility, unified communications, business intelligence, and performance management. This is a layer the global chemical workforce (no matter which functional discipline you are in) demands to allow easier access into business and technical systems, and easier access to work with each other. At Microsoft, we call this role-based productivity - bringing people together with processes and other people in a seamless way to be more productive.

In addition, we also shared our point-of-view on the dual ERP strategy. It is not a new scenario, but one that has some momentum behind it, as chemical companies continue to reshape their portfolios - adding and subtracting businesses, and entering into joint-ventures.

The need to have a flexible business management platform is that much more important in this environment - and sometimes in contrast to the model of single-global instance. Your ERP strategy should align to your business strategy, and we are seeing large chemical companies benefit from the flexibility of having a secondary ERP standard (in our case Dynamics AX or Dynamics NAV). Check out the presentation for more information, but I've included a slide about this below.

verview ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning)

Some organizations typically those with sufficient in-house IT skills to integrate multiple software products choose to implement only portions of an ERP system and develop an external interface to other ERP or stand-alone systems for their other application needs. For instance, the PeopleSoft HRMS and financials systems may be perceived to be better than SAP's HRMS solution. And likewise, some may perceive SAP's manufacturing and CRM systems as better than PeopleSoft's equivalents. In this case these organizations may justify the purchase of an ERP system, but choose to purchase the PeopleSoft HRMS and financials modules from Oracle, and their remaining applications from SAP.

This is very common in the retail sector, where even a mid-sized retailer will have a discrete Point-of-Sale (POS) product and financials application, then a series of specialized applications to handle business requirements such as warehouse management, staff rostering, merchandising and logistics.

Ideally, ERP delivers a single database that contains all data for the software modules, which would include:

Manufacturing
Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow
Supply Chain Management
Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing, Product Configurator, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Scheduling, Inspection of goods, Claim Processing, Commission Calculation
Financials
General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets
Projects
Costing, Billing, Time and Expense, Activity Management
Human Resources
Human Resources, Payroll, Training, Time & Attendance, Benefits
Customer Relationship Management
Sales and Marketing, Commissions, Service, Customer Contact and Call Center support
Data Warehouse
and various Self-Service interfaces for Customers, Suppliers, and Employees

Enterprise Resource Planning is a term originally derived from manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) that followed material requirements planning (MRP).MRP evolved into ERP when "routings" became a major part of the software architecture and a company's capacity planning activity also became a part of the standard software activity.ERP systems typically handle the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping, invoicing, and accounting for a company. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software can aid in the control of many business activities, like sales, marketing, delivery, billing, production, inventory management, quality management, and human resource management.

ERP systems saw a large boost in sales in the 1990s as companies faced the Y2K problem in their legacy systems. Many companies took this opportunity to replace their legacy information systems with ERP systems. This rapid growth in sales was followed by a slump in 1999, at which time most companies had already implemented their Y2K solution.

ERPs are often incorrectly called back office systems indicating that customers and the general public are not directly involved. This is contrasted with front office systems like customer relationship management (CRM) systems that deal directly with the customers, or the eBusiness systems such as eCommerce, eGovernment, eTelecom, and eFinance, or supplier relationship management (SRM) systems.

ERPs are cross-functional and enterprise wide. All functional departments that are involved in operations or production are integrated in one system. In addition to manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and information technology, this would include accounting, human resources, marketing, and strategic management.

ERP II means open ERP architecture of components. The older, monolithic ERP systems became component oriented.

EAS Enterprise Application Suite is a new name for formerly developed ERP systems which include (almost) all segments of business, using ordinary Internet browsers as thin clients

Advantages

In the absence of an ERP system, a large manufacturer may find itself with many software applications that do not talk to each other and do not effectively interface. Tasks that need to interface with one another may involve:

• design engineering (how to best make the product)
• order tracking from acceptance through fulfillment
• the revenue cycle from invoice through cash receipt
• managing interdependencies of complex Bill of Materials
• tracking the 3-way match between Purchase orders (what was ordered), Inventory receipts (what arrived), and Costing (what the vendor invoiced)
• the Accounting for all of these tasks, tracking the Revenue, Cost and Profit on a granular level.

Change how a product is made, in the engineering details, and that is how it will now be made. Effective dates can be used to control when the switch over will occur from an old version to the next one, both the date that some ingredients go into effect, and date that some are discontinued. Part of the change can include labeling to identify version numbers.

Computer security is included within an ERP to protect against both outsider crime, such as industrial espionage, and insider crime, such as embezzlement. A data tampering scenario might involve a disgruntled employee intentionally modifying prices to below the breakeven point in order to attempt to take down the company, or other sabotage. ERP security helps to prevent abuse as well.

Topography of ERP response to tactile stimulus at approximately 50 ms after stimulus presentation

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This illustration is from NIAAA's Laboratory of Clinical Studies, Section of Brain Electrophysiology and Imaging.

Einzigartige ERP-Software für Linux-Systeme spart Kosten im Mittelstand.

actindo Pro ist ab sofort auch unter www.linux-onlineshop.de erhältlich.

actindo ERP-System Übersicht

(pressebox) München, 05.04.2007, Die actindo GmbH bietet eine plattformunabhängige Warenwirtschaftslösung für jeden Bedarf.
Aufgrund der voll webbasierten Anwendungen ist weder ein eigener Server noch eine Installation notwendig. Hosting, Wartung, Backups und Updates werden vollständig von actindo übernommen. Für einen konkurrenzlos günstigen Preis erhalten mittelständische Anwender eine professionelle und flexible Softwarelösung, die den gesamten Betriebsprozess abbildet.

Mittels einer Anbindung an das xt:Commerce Online-Shop-System erfolgt ein durchgängiger Workflow zwischen Off- und Online-Business. Die Lösung ist als so genannte „Software as a Service“ (SaaS-Mietmodell) unter anderem bei www.linux-onlineshop.de erhältlich

Mit den Zusatzmodulen wie Finanzbuchhaltung, Zeiterfassung, Kassenbuch und Dokumentenarchiv, einem revisionssichern Geschäftsdaten- und Belegarchiv behalten Unternehmer jederzeit den vollen Überblick beim Planen und Entschieden.

Durch die Einbindung service-orientierter Architekturen (SOA) bildet die Software Funktionalitäten als so genannte "Services" ab und bietet dadurch von außen hin ansprechbare Schnittstellen an. Die Web-Services-Standards wie XMLRPC garantieren, dass die Kommunikation auf verschiedenen Plattformen und Programmiersprachen auch unternehmensübergreifend funktioniert.

Wandlungsfähige ERP-Systeme - Entwicklung, Auswahl und Methode (2. Auflage)
	Kurzbeschreibung ERP-Systeme sind heute ein Standbein der Unternehmen alles Unternehmensgrößen. Da die Unternehmen einem ständigen Anpassungsdruck unterlegen sind, müssen auch die ERP-Systeme in der Lage sein, auf diese Änderungen reagieren zu können. Die Wandlungsfähigkeit setzt sich dabei aus verschiedenen Ebenen zusammen. Zum einen muss der Bedarf der Änderung erkannt werden, des weiteren müssen die für eine Änderung relevanten Bereiche im System identifiziert werden und zum anderen muss auch das System selbst, die Fähigkeit mitbringen, sich anpassen zu können. Die Wandlungsfähigkeit von ERP-Systemen ist ein vielschichtiges Thema. Fragen des Aufbaus, der Erkennens und des Umgangs mit dem Thema Wandlungsfähigkeit sowohl aus Sicht der Wissenschaft und Forschung, als auch der Sicht der Entwickler und Anwender von ERP-Systemen werden in diesem Buch vorgestellt.

System Administration - II

Customized Menus

In CANIAS ERP System Administration , search screen will be displayed which can be selected according to various searching criteria by available user menus thanks to the system menus application. Here you can specify all menu definitions of system according to the criteria that can be combined in numerous manners. You can record new user-defined menus in one language under the application. Creating user-defined menus help end-user use the system more effectively and comfortably.

Business Calendar

You can prepare business calendars for your company thanks to CANIAS ERP System Administration . You can define normal working times and occasions with these calendars and enable all modules use this central data.

System Diary

A logging application that include login and application information of users is available for users.