ERP Application essays

ERP Application essays Increasingly, corporations are recognizing the strategic role of the operations function. These organizations are discovering that a focus on customer needs is effective only if the operations function is designed and managed to meet those needs. From acquiring raw materials to fabricating parts, to assembling products, to customer delivery, a total systems perspective can enable us, in the ideal, to fashion an operations function like the inner workings of a finely tuned machine. That operation can be fine-tuned by using modern information systems. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems provide comprehensive management of financial, manufacturing, sales, distribution and human resources across the enterprise. The ability of ERP systems to support data "drill down" and to eliminate the need to reconcile across functions is designed to enable organizations to compete on the performances of the entire supply chain. (Welti) To utilize these capabilities managers have to lea rn how to manage processes in the ERP environment. Just what is ERP? It doesnt live up its acronym. Forget about planning-it doesnt do that-and forget about resource, thats a throwaway term. Keep in mind the enterprise part. That is ERPs true ambition to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto one single system. Modern day ERP systems, Material Resource Planning (MRP) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII) are the primary business systems installed in thousands of manufacturing companies around the world. These systems appeared shortly after the advent of the computer and were simplistic in nature compared to todays modern systems. The idea behind ERP is that the software needs to communicate across functions. The financial module can cut accounts payable checks as soon as the loading dock clerk confirms that the goods have been received in inventory. Similarly the accounts receivable can generate ...