Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Enterprise Systems
(ES) is employed by organizations for integrating and automating
the business processes which in due course, leads to strategic
value. Keeping this in mind, ES can be seen as composed
of two dimensions: Business scope and information processing
sophistication. It comprises the following elements:
The ES supports three different domainsinternal to
a firm, the value chain and a set of collaborative peers.
Manufacturing, finance, HR come under the first domain whereas
supply chain and peer networks fall under the second and
the third domain. The internal processes are easy to connect
but integration outside the internal area requires management
attention and has to face system hurdles.This refers to the kind and level of information that is
available. The information is generated at three levels
- transaction automation, process management, and knowledge
management. The current generation ERP systems are mostly
considered to be passive and they capture transactional
data.Typically, ERP works on a model where there are standard
business processes defined in the system. The organizational
processes are either built or mapped around it. If the process
in the organization and ERP do not match, they are re-engineered
to fit into the system. The process becomes very fast as
human involvement in transaction becomes limited.
At this point, the ability to take action on gathered data
comes into picture. Here, the ability of a system to work
on certain predefined algorithms comes into play. Suppose
the inventory gets depleted beyond the critical level, can
the system generate an order that is optimum in every sense?
Process management, of course, requires defining business
rules - that is a human being's capability to understand
what will happen in a particular scenario. The next generation
ERP systems, in all probabilities, will consist of decision
capabilities. Decision capabilities do not mean that these
systems will replace human beings but they are expected
to help in reducing the chances of errors. Here, the amount
and need of human intervention is reduced.
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