FREE online courses on Business Needs and ERP - Business Needs And ERP -
Diffusing Boundaries
To be able to recast their business in line with the above
challenges, organizations are themselves getting redefined. Operations are
becoming decentralized and multi location. Risks are being spread over multiple
products and various classes of manufacturing –discrete, process and
make/engineer-to-order – are coexisting. Some end products are becoming raw
materials for others and manufacturing is getting diffused with distribution
across an extended supply chain. The organization boundaries themselves are
getting diffused as more and more stakeholders are getting tied in to form a
synergistic and harmonious business ecosystem, each entity delivering value to
the other.
It is logical to assume from a systemic viewpoint that such a
pseudopodic business landscape needs a very robust underlying infrastructure. An
infrastructure that primarily endows flexibility and agility to respond and
readjust to the three Cs on the one hand and on the other, ensures tight
control, checks and balances across all the enterprise resources, functions and
processes.
One of the key features of a true ERP system is that the data
is captured at the point of origin and impacts all related subsystems, thereby
making it available to every participant in the process.
It is meant to integrate the entire enterprise, starting from
supplier/vendor to the customer covering not only financial, inbound and
outbound logistics and human resources but also cross-functional supply chain
optimization and execution and business intelligence function sets. The various
areas covered by ERP are:
Financial Accounting, Treasury Management, Enterprise
Controlling, Asset Management.
Production Planning, Materials Management, Plant Maintenance,
Quality Management, Project Systems, Sales and Distribution.
Personnel Management, Training and Development, Skills and
Management.
Planner and Optimizer, E-commerce/Business-to-business
Commerce, Sales Force Automation and Business Warehouse.
Business Workflow, Executive Information Systems, Early
Warning Systems.
What emerges is that, contrary to popular belief; an ERP is
much more than an application that supports a few essential enterprise functions
like finance, payroll and inventory. It is an application that promises to
induce a certain way of life not only within the organization where it gets
implemented but also in the larger community to which the organization belongs.
