Proposal Of ERP System Software For RealTech Organization - Essay.

Prepare a report to propose an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system software for the RealTech organization. Your proposal should consider the followings: 
 
1. Identify and differentiate four types of ERP software applications that provides integrate and efficient management of the business operations. 
2. Propose one specific ERP software application can be used by the RealTech to integrate and coordinate information in every area of the business. Justify your answer.  
3. Explain the main features of the proposed application that suit the RealTech business functions. 
4. Discuss how the new system help ease the transition for the organization. 
5. Discuss how the new application can help the main functional areas of the RealTech operations: Marketing and Sales, Supply Chain Management, Accounting and Finance, and Human Resources. 

What is ERP and its benefits?

The aim of this report is to propose Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system software for RealTeh organization. Objectives of this project proposal are:

• to demonstrate impact of ERP system on business
• To demonstrate issues involved in the design, implementation and maintenance of ERP system.
• To Evaluate the benefits and limitations of ERP system

Types of ERP application software have been proposed in this report with brief description on them. This report also emphasis on the comparison between ERP application software. Based on these discussions ERP application software has been proposed for the RealTech organization and also demonstrated how this new system help ease the transition for the organization.

ERP can be described as the business process management software that gives access to the organization or firm to use the system of integrated applications in order to manage the operational activities, business and helps in automating the back office operations related to the human resources, services and technology.

SAP R/3 and B1:SAP: There are two solutions that are being offered by this application software firstly, the R/3 suite and secondly, is the B1 (Business one) suite, sometimes often called "business one." Business one targets those enterprises, which are offering pre-built modules for finance, e-commerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), warehousing, purchasing and reporting to the small and medium-sized businesses (Wanas, 2016). R/3 can be represented as integrated software systems that can be much more helpful in order to support all the operational activities for the companies those are small in strength and production and also for the very large corporations. Technically it can be explained that R/3 uses a client/server architecture that can provide access to the different database platforms or server platforms that includes UNIX, OS/400, and Windows Server. A number of database packages, SQL Server, including Oracle, or DB2 can be used to implement it.

LN/Baan: The Baan Corporation had created Baan ERP software for real in The Netherlands. Later on in 2003, it was purchased by Infor Global Solutions from the Baan Corporation. The ERP software that is being offered by this vendor is designed in a manner that it provides benefits for different manufacturing industries, which are working on complex products with the complex supply chains that are accessed on different methodologies (Mtuveta, 2013). Baan is especially designed, which suited for large engineering-to-order and made-to-order companies. Baan application software is highly customizable and it can also support flow chart based procedure and process documentation operations. Currently Baan is being used by several companies like Ferrari, The Boeing Company, Solectron, Flextronics, Fiat, Evenflo, British Aerospace and Engineering Systems, and Navistar. It has the potential to raise an organization from a competitive market and enhance the performance of the organization (Agrawal et al., 2015).

Types of ERP application software proposed with brief description

Microsoft Dynamics NAV and AX 2009:Two ERP software packages are being offered by Microsoft. First one is Microsoft AX 2009, which is designed for the medium to large organizations and provides facilities like functions that can be useful for the companies those are doing business in more than one countries (Luszczak, 2012). Second ERP software package is Microsoft NAV, whose targets are the small and medium-sized businesses and it can offer several modules for the analysis, CRM, e-commerce, finance, supply chain management, and manufacturing. The main focus of this software package is to make less effort on improving the individual productivity (Production related to each individual) and this software is better suited for the organizations and enterprises like service organizations, wholesalers, manufacturing companies, and retail-oriented enterprises. Among these two software packages AX 2009 is more customizable with respect to the NAV software package (Nobauer et al., 2012).

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: EnterpriseOne is a software package created by JD Edwards, which is an Oracle-based ERP system. EnterpriseOne can offer pre-designed modules, whose main focus is on the deep understanding of different business processes and standards-based process engineering and it also focuses on requirements (Nooijen, Van Dongen&Fahland, 2012). Oracle Corporation is currently the right owner of EnterpriseOne. Offered modules include, analytics, capital asset management, CRM, human capital management, manufacturing, project management, finance management and ordering systems. Specific industries such as real estate, construction, food production and beverage production are applicable to incorporate this system into their firms.

Comparing all the four application software stated above it can be stated that SAP has the largest ERP market among all the three others with 23 percent whereas, Microsoft has 9 percent, and Infor and Oracle have 16 percent. Rest of the market is being covered by Tier1, Tier 2 and others (Ruiz, 2017). Among these SAP has the highest selection rate and short listing rate too, when its software is shortlisted. Based on the Clash of Titans survey, it can be reported that the implementation of SAP ERP systems enables in delivering the fastest financial payback than other three service providers. One the other hand its implementation is much more costly whereas, Microsoft comes in medium range and Oracle is the cheapest one (Kainulainen, 2012).

SAP can be proposed as the best suitable ERP application for delivering the RealTech’s operational activities in more efficient and effective manner.

SAP ERP application software can be helpful in collecting and combining data from different modules in order to provide the RealTech organization with ERP (Enterprise resource Planning). The modules offered by SAP includes Controlling (CO), Sales & Distribution (SD), Financial Accounting (FI), Sales & Distribution (SD), Asset Accounting (AA), Material Management (MM), Quality Management (QM), Product Planning (PP), Project System (PS),Human Resources (HR), and Plant Maintenance (PM) (Machal, 2013). There are four typical phases in the implementation of SAP into the system of RealTech, which can be listed as: the first phase is the Project Preparation, the second phase is the Business Blueprint, the third phase is Realization, the fourth phase is Final Preparation and lastly the fifth phase is Golive Support. Realtech should pay specific attention to the system integration in order to make the implementation of ERP system successful.

Comparison between ERP application software

SAP ERP system application software will help Realtech in providing real-time information by reducing the possibilities of redundancy errors (Farber et al., 2012). It will allow easier integration with the Global market by breaking the barriers like currency exchange, language, culture and many more. Maintenance will not be needed, as there will be only one update that will be done during the implementation of this package into the existing system. It will also help in creating an environment of employees with efficiency in work (Huang &Handfield, 2015).

Conclusion

Based on the above report it can be concluded that implementation of ERP system into an organization can change the face of the organization by enhancing the performance of the organization and increasing the efficiency by reducing errors. As stated above there are various benefits of this implementation such as one time maintenance, real-time information, more efficient output, user interface and many more. There are several disadvantages of this implementation too, which are first inflexibility as, it might not fit with the business model of the RealTech and customization can be expensive. Return on investment may take longer time than expectations, even its implementation has risk that can lead to the failure of the project and locked with the service provider agreements.

• Realtech should change the existing system and customize it with latest technologies
• SAP can be recommended as the best SAP ERP application for the RealTech organization.
• It will help in eliminating the existing issues
• It will also help in accessing ne and wider scopes for the business of the organization.

References:

Agrawal, D., Butt, A., Doshi, K., Larriba-Pey, J. L., Li, M., Reiss, F. R., ...& Xia, Y. (2015, August). SparkBench–a spark performance testing suite.In Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (pp. 26-44).Springer, Cham.

Färber, F., Cha, S. K., Primsch, J., Bornhövd, C., Sigg, S., &Lehner, W. (2012). SAP HANA database: data management for modern business applications. ACM Sigmod Record, 40(4), 45-51.

Huang, Y. Y., &Handfield, R. B. (2015).Measuring the benefits of ERP on supply management maturity model: a “big data” method. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 35(1), 2-25.

Kainulainen, M. (2012). Activation of New Functionality to Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Case TeliaSonera’s SAP Enhancement Packages.

Luszczak, A. (2012). Using Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Machal, M. (2013). Two tier ERP systems: Combination of on premise and cloud. Cloud ERP manufacturing service outsourcing.

Mtuveta, J. S. (2013). Assessment of enterprise resource planning Systems (erp) in tanzania: a case of serengeti Breweries limited (sbl) (Doctoral dissertation, Mzumbe University).

Nöbauer, M., Seyff, N., Dhungana, D., &Stoiber, R. (2012, January). Managing variability of ERP ecosystems: research issues and solution ideas from Microsoft Dynamics AX. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems (pp. 21-26).ACM.

Nooijen, E. H., van Dongen, B. F., &Fahland, D. (2012, September).Automatic Discovery of Data-Centric and Artifact-Centric Processes.In Business Process Management Workshops (Vol. 132, pp. 316-327).

Ruiz, C. M. (2017).Comparison of SAP ERP and Microsoft Dynamics (AX) in Teaching Workflow and Process Management Systems (Doctoral dissertation).

Wanas, G. S. (2016). College of Computing & Information Technology Decreasing ERP Implementation Failure in Egypt (Doctoral dissertation, Arab Academy for Science).