Book Description

Businesses today are faced with avalanche of information. There is need to effectively manage information to serve customers better. In today's highly competitive environment, businesses need to be able to organize and coordinate their information so that a single view of information is maintained by all the service channels. Information management can help to understand customers? wants and needs and integrate such in product design. It helps to manage inventory and reduces both cost and the cycle time to introduce new products to the marketplace. Time-to-market is a critical issue in achieving competitiveness and without the availability of timely and accurate information; it will not be possible to respond proactively to the changing market environment. This book is about ERP and Supply Chain Management. ERP is the short form for Enterprise Resource Planning. The aim of ERP is to integrate the functions of the different business units and departments such as finance, operations, accounting and human resources. This integration is necessary to organize and coordinate information that may be scattered in different departments and making them available in an organized format to the different decision centers where they may be needed. Through this integrative approach, the different functional units of the business are able to share a common database, exchange information, and have consistent view of their operations. This consistent view is also presented to the customer thus improving the quality of customer service. With the integration of the information system, the different functional departments work together to achieve common organizational goals and objectives. Without suchintegration, common customer services such as order processing would be difficult to track and inconsistent information may be relayed by the different departments to the customer. Supply chain management is an integral aspect of ERP. Businesses today focus on their core competence. It is no longer technically and economically feasible to focus on all activities. Rather, certain activities may be shifted to partners or vendors that have core competence in such areas. Mercedes Benz may find it better to subcontract its radios to Bose while focusing on its car designing. Yet, these two companies may need to share key information on customers? wants and needs as well as information on product designs. Integrating a supplier into the common database helps in providing quality products and services that will satisfy the needs of the customer. Information technology plays a critical role in effective development of ERP system. As many businesses develop online marketplace, it becomes even more important to develop a single view of transactions to all value chain partners including customers, manufacturer, suppliers and other vendors. This book therefore adopts a focus on ERP and Supply Chain Management to develop better plans to better serve the customer. It adopts a management and a systemic perspective of these issues and does not deal with the software aspects of ERP. The focus is on the fundamentals rather than on the advanced issues. The book is intended to help managers, executives, and students to understand the basic concepts of ERP and Supply Chain Management.