Major Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications are specifically designed for the sole purpose of promoting the needs and objectives of the organizations.

Enterprise applications provide business-oriented tools supporting electronic commerce, enterprise communication and collaboration, and web-enabled business processes both within a networked enterprise and with its customers and business partners.

Services Provided by Enterprise Applications

Some of the services provided by an enterprise application includes:

• Online shopping, billing and payment processing
• Interactive product catalogue
• Content management
• Customer relationship management
• Manufacturing and other business processes integration
• IT services management
• Enterprise resource management
• Human resource management
• Business intelligence management
• Business collaboration and security
• Form automation

Basically these applications intend to model the business processes, i.e., how the entire organization works. These tools work by displaying, manipulating and storing large amounts of data and automating the business processes with these data.

Most Commonly Used Enterprise Applications

Multitude of applications comes under the definition of Enterprise Applications:

• Management information system (MIS)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Decision Support System (DSS)
• Knowledge Management Systems (KMS)
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Executive Support System (ESS)
• Business Intelligence System (BIS)
• Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
• Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)

 

MIS – Enterprise Resource Planning

ERP is an integrated, real-time, cross-functional enterprise application, an enterprise-wide transaction framework that supports all the internal business processes of a company.

It supports all core business processes such as sales order processing, inventory management and control, production and distribution planning, and finance.

Why of ERP?

ERP is very helpful in the follwoing areas:

• Business integration and automated data update
• Linkage between all core business processes and easy flow of integration
• Flexibility in business operations and more agility to the company
• Better analysis and planning capabilities
• Critical decision-making
• Competitive advantage
• Use of latest technologies

Features of ERP

The following diagram illustrates the features of ERP:

Scope of ERP

• Finance: Financial accounting, Managerial accounting, treasury management, asset management, budget control, costing, and enterprise control.
• Logistics: Production planning, material management, plant maintenance, project management, events management, etc.
• Human resource: Personnel management, training and development, etc.
• Supply Chain: Inventory control, purchase and order control, supplier scheduling, planning, etc.
• Work flow: Integrate the entire organization with the flexible assignment of tasks and responsibility to locations, position, jobs, etc.

Advantages of ERP

• Reduction of lead time
• Reduction of cycle time
• Better customer satisfaction
• Increased flexibility, quality, and efficiency
• Improved information accuracy and decision making capability
• Onetime shipment
• Improved resource utilization
• Improve supplier performance
• Reduced quality costs
• Quick decision-making
• Forecasting and optimization
• Better transparency

Disadvantage of ERP

• Expense and time in implementation
• Difficulty in integration with other system
• Risk of implementation failure
• Difficulty in implementation change
• Risk in using one vendor

MIS – Customer Relationship Management

CRM is an enterprise application module that manages a company’s interactions with current and future customers by organizing and coordinating, sales and marketing, and providing better customer services along with technical support.

Atul Parvatiyar and Jagdish N. Sheth provide an excellent definition for customer relationship management in their work titled – ‘Customer Relationship Management: Emerging Practice, Process, and Discipline‘:

Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive strategy and process of acquiring, retaining, and partnering with selective customers to create superior value for the company and the customer. It involves the integration of marketing, sales, customer service, and the supply-chain functions of the organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness in delivering customer value.

Why CRM?

• To keep track of all present and future customers.
• To identify and target the best customers.
• To let the customers know about the existing as well as the new products and services.
• To provide real-time and personalized services based on the needs and habits of the existing customers.
• To provide superior service and consistent customer experience.
• To implement a feedback system.

Scope of CRM

Advantages of CRM

• Provides better customer service and increases customer revenues.
• Discovers new customers.
• Cross-sells and up-sells products more effectively.
• Helps sales staff to close deals faster.
• Makes call centers more efficient.
• Simplifies marketing and sales processes.

Disadvantages of CRM

• Some times record loss is a major problem.
• Overhead costs.
• Giving training to employees is an issue in small organizations.

 

MIS – Decision Support System

Decision support systems (DSS) are interactive software-based systems intended to help managers in decision-making by accessing large volumes of information generated from various related information systems involved in organizational business processes, such as office automation system, transaction processing system, etc.

DSS uses the summary information, exceptions, patterns, and trends using the analytical models. A decision support system helps in decision-making but does not necessarily give a decision itself. The decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Programmed and Non-programmed Decisions

There are two types of decisions – programmed and non-programmed decisions.

Programmed decisions are basically automated processes, general routine work, where:

• These decisions have been taken several times.
• These decisions follow some guidelines or rules.

For example, selecting a reorder level for inventories, is a programmed decision.

Non-programmed decisions occur in unusual and non-addressed situations, so:

• It would be a new decision.
• There will not be any rules to follow.
• These decisions are made based on the available information.
• These decisions are based on the manger’s discretion, instinct, perception and judgment.

For example, investing in a new technology is a non-programmed decision.

Decision support systems generally involve non-programmed decisions. Therefore, there will be no exact report, content, or format for these systems. Reports are generated on the fly.

Attributes of a DSS

• Adaptability and flexibility
• High level of Interactivity
• Ease of use
• Efficiency and effectiveness
• Complete control by decision-makers
• Ease of development
• Extendibility
• Support for modeling and analysis
• Support for data access
• Standalone, integrated, and Web-based

Characteristics of a DSS

• Support for decision-makers in semi-structured and unstructured problems.
• Support for managers at various managerial levels, ranging from top executive to line managers.
• Support for individuals and groups. Less structured problems often requires the involvement of several individuals from different departments and organization level.
• Support for interdependent or sequential decisions.
• Support for intelligence, design, choice, and implementation.
• Support for variety of decision processes and styles.
• DSSs are adaptive over time.

Benefits of DSS

• Improves efficiency and speed of decision-making activities.
• Increases the control, competitiveness and capability of futuristic decision-making of the organization.
• Facilitates interpersonal communication.
• Encourages learning or training.
• Since it is mostly used in non-programmed decisions, it reveals new approaches and sets up new evidences for an unusual decision.
• Helps automate managerial processes.

Components of a DSS

Following are the components of the Decision Support System:

• Database Management System (DBMS): To solve a problem the necessary data may come from internal or external database. In an organization, internal data are generated by a system such as TPS and MIS. External data come from a variety of sources such as newspapers, online data services, databases (financial, marketing, human resources).
• Model Management System: It stores and accesses models that managers use to make decisions. Such models are used for designing manufacturing facility, analyzing the financial health of an organization, forecasting demand of a product or service, etc.

  Support Tools: Support tools like online help; pulls down menus, user interfaces, graphical analysis, error correction mechanism, facilitates the user interactions with the system.

Classification of DSS

There are several ways to classify DSS. Hoi Apple and Whinstone classifies DSS as follows:

• Text Oriented DSS: It contains textually represented information that could have a bearing on decision. It allows documents to be electronically created, revised and viewed as needed.
• Database Oriented DSS: Database plays a major role here; it contains organized and highly structured data.
• Spreadsheet Oriented DSS: It contains information in spread sheets that allows create, view, modify procedural knowledge and also instructs the system to execute self-contained instructions. The most popular tool is Excel and Lotus 1-2-3.
• Solver Oriented DSS: It is based on a solver, which is an algorithm or procedure written for performing certain calculations and particular program type.
• Rules Oriented DSS: It follows certain procedures adopted as rules.
• Rules Oriented DSS: Procedures are adopted in rules oriented DSS. Export system is the example.
• Compound DSS: It is built by using two or more of the five structures explained above.

Types of DSS

Following are some typical DSSs:

• Status Inquiry System: It helps in taking operational, management level, or middle level management decisions, for example daily schedules of jobs to machines or machines to operators.
• Data Analysis System: It needs comparative analysis and makes use of formula or an algorithm, for example cash flow analysis, inventory analysis etc.
• Information Analysis System: In this system data is analyzed and the information report is generated. For example, sales analysis, accounts receivable systems, market analysis etc.
• Accounting System: It keeps track of accounting and finance related information, for example, final account, accounts receivables, accounts payables, etc. that keep track of the major aspects of the business.
• Model Based System: Simulation models or optimization models used for decision-making are used infrequently and creates general guidelines for operation or management.

 

MIS – Knowledge Management System

All the systems we are discussing here come under knowledge management category. A knowledge management system is not radically different from all these information systems, but it just extends the already existing systems by assimilating more information.

As we have seen, data is raw facts, information is processed and/or interpreted data, and knowledge is personalized information.

What is Knowledge?

• Personalized information
• State of knowing and understanding
• An object to be stored and manipulated
• A process of applying expertise
• A condition of access to information
• Potential to influence action

Sources of Knowledge of an Organization

• Intranet
• Data warehouses and knowledge repositories
• Decision support tools
• Groupware for supporting collaboration
• Networks of knowledge workers
• Internal expertise

Definition of KMS

A knowledge management system comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption to insight and experience. Such insights and experience comprise knowledge, either embodied in individual or embedded in organizational processes and practices.

Purpose of KMS

• Improved performance
• Competitive advantage
• Innovation
• Sharing of knowledge
• Integration
• Continuous improvement by:
  • Driving strategy
  • Starting new lines of business
  • Solving problems faster
  • Developing professional skills
  • Recruit and retain talent

Activities in Knowledge Management

• Start with the business problem and the business value to be delivered first.
• Identify what kind of strategy to pursue to deliver this value and address the KM problem.
• Think about the system required from a people and process point of view.
• Finally, think about what kind of technical infrastructure are required to support the people and processes.
• Implement system and processes with appropriate change management and iterative staged release.

Level of Knowledge Management

 

MIS – Content Management System

A Content Management System (CMS) allows publishing, editing, and modifying content as well as its maintenance by combining rules, processes and/or workflows, from a central interface, in a collaborative environment.

A CMS may serve as a central repository for content, which could be, textual data, documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, and/or scientific data.

Functions of Content Management

• Creating content
• Storing content
• Indexing content
• Searching content
• Retrieving content
• Publishing content
• Archiving content
• Revising content
• Managing content end-to-end

Content Management Workflow

• Designing content template, for example web administrator designs webpage template for web content management.
• Creating content blocks, for example, a web administrator adds empower CMS tags called “content blocks” to webpage template using CMS.
• Positioning content blocks on the document, for example, web administrator positions content blocks in webpage.
• Authoring content providers to search, retrieve, view and update content.

Advantages of CMS

Content management system helps to secure privacy and currency of the content and enhances performance by:

• Ensuring integrity and accuracy of content by ensuring only one user modifies the content at a time.
• Implementing audit trails to monitor changes made in content over time.
• Providing secured user access to content.
• Organization of content into related groups and folders.
• Allowing searching and retrieval of content.
• Recording information and meta-data related to the content, like author and title of content, version of content, date and time of creating the content etc.
• Workflow based routing of content from one user to another.
• Converting paper-based content to digital format.
• Organizing content into groups and distributing it to target audience.

 

MIS – Executive Support System

Executive support systems are intended to be used by the senior managers directly to provide support to non-programmed decisions in strategic management.

These information are often external, unstructured and even uncertain. Exact scope and context of such information is often not known beforehand.

This information is intelligence based:

• Market intelligence
• Investment intelligence
• Technology intelligence

Examples of Intelligent Information

Following are some examples of intelligent information, which is often the source of an ESS:

• External databases
• Technology reports like patent records etc.
• Technical reports from consultants
• Market reports
• Confidential information about competitors
• Speculative information like market conditions
• Government policies
• Financial reports and information

Features of Executive Information System

Advantages of ESS

• Easy for upper level executive to use
• Ability to analyze trends
• Augmentation of managers’ leadership capabilities
• Enhance personal thinking and decision-making
• Contribution to strategic control flexibility
• Enhance organizational competitiveness in the market place
• Instruments of change
• Increased executive time horizons.
• Better reporting system
• Improved mental model of business executive
• Help improve consensus building and communication
• Improve office automation
• Reduce time for finding information
• Early identification of company performance
• Detail examination of critical success factor
• Better understanding
• Time management
• Increased communication capacity and quality

Disadvantage of ESS

• Functions are limited
• Hard to quantify benefits
• Executive may encounter information overload
• System may become slow
• Difficult to keep current data
• May lead to less reliable and insecure data
• Excessive cost for small company

 

MIS – Business Intelligence System

The term ‘Business Intelligence’ has evolved from the decision support systems and gained strength with the technology and applications like data warehouses, Executive Information Systems and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).

Business Intelligence System is basically a system used for finding patterns from existing data from operations.

Characteristics of BIS

• It is created by procuring data and information for use in decision-making.
• It is a combination of skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices.
• It contains background data along with the reporting tools.
• It is a combination of a set of concepts and methods strengthened by fact-based support systems.
• It is an extension of Executive Support System or Executive Information System.
• It collects, integrates, stores, analyzes, and provides access to business information
• It is an environment in which business users get reliable, secure, consistent, comprehensible, easily manipulated and timely information.
• It provides business insights that lead to better, faster, more relevant decisions.

Benefits of BIS

• Improved Management Processes.
• Planning, controlling, measuring and/or applying changes that results in increased revenues and reduced costs.
• Improved business operations.
• Fraud detection, order processing, purchasing that results in increased revenues and reduced costs.
• Intelligent prediction of future.

Approaches of BIS

For most companies, it is not possible to implement a proactive business intelligence system at one go. The following techniques and methodologies could be taken as approaches to BIS:

• Improving reporting and analytical capabilities
• Using scorecards and dashboards
• Enterprise Reporting
• On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) Analysis
• Advanced and Predictive Analysis
• Alerts and Proactive Notification
• Automated generation of reports with user subscriptions and “alerts” to problems and/or opportunities.

Capabilities of BIS

• Data Storage and Management:
  • Data ware house
  • Ad hoc analysis
  • Data quality
  • Data mining
• Information Delivery
  • Dashboard
  • Collaboration /search
  • Managed reporting
  • Visualization
  • Scorecard
• Query, Reporting and Analysis
  • Ad hoc Analysis
  • Production reporting
  • OLAP analysis

 

MIS – Enterprise Application Integration

An organization may use various information systems:

• Supply Chain Management: For managing suppliers, inventory and shipping, etc.
• Human Resource Management: For managing personnel, training and recruiting talents;
• Employee Health Care: For managing medical records and insurance details of employees;
• Customer Relationship Management: For managing current and potential customers;
• Business Intelligence Applications: For finding the patterns from existing data from business operations.

All these systems work as individual islands of automation. Most often these systems are standalone and do not communicate with each other due to incompatibility issues such as:

• Operating systems they are residing on;
• Database system used in the system;
• Legacy systems not supported anymore.

EAI is an integration framework, a middleware, made of a collection of technologies and services that allows smooth integration of all such systems and applications throughout the enterprise and enables data sharing and more automation of business processes.

Characteristics of EAI

• EAI is defined as “the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected applications and data sources in the enterprise.”
• EAI, when used effectively allows integration without any major changes to current infrastructure.
• Extends middleware capabilities to cope with application integration.
• Uses application logic layers of different middleware systems as building blocks.
• Keeps track of information related to the operations of the enterprise e.g. Inventory, sales ledger and execute the core processes that create and manipulate this information.

Need for Enterprise-wise Integration

• Unrestricted sharing of data and business processes across an organization.
• Linkage between customers, suppliers and regulators.
• The linking of data, business processes and applications to automate business processes.
• Ensure consistent qualities of service (security, reliability etc.).
• Reduce the on-going cost of maintenance and reduce the cost of rolling out new systems.

Challenges of EAI

• Hub and spoke architecture concentrates all of the processing into a single server/cluster.
• Often became hard to maintain and evolve efficiently.
• Hard to extend to integrate 3rd parties on other technology platforms.
• The canonical data model introduces an intermediary step.
• Added complexity and additional processing effort.
• EAI products typified.
• Heavy customization required to implement the solution.
• Lock-In: Often built using proprietary technology and required specialist skills.
• Lack of flexibility: Hard to extend or to integrate with other EAI products!
• Requires organization to be EAI ready.

Types of EAI

• Data Level – Process, techniques and technology of moving data between data stores.
• Application Interface Level – Leveraging of interfaces exposed by custom or packaged applications.
• Method Level – Sharing of the business logic.
• User Interface Level – Packaging applications by using their user interface as a common point of integration.

 

MIS – Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or Business Continuity and Resiliency Planning (BCRP) creates a guideline for continuing business operations under adverse conditions such as a natural calamity, an interruption in regular business processes, loss or damage to critical infrastructure, or a crime done against the business.

It is defined as a plan that “identifies an organization’s exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity.”

Understandably, risk management and disaster management are major components in business continuity planning.

Objectives of BCP

Following are the objectives of BCP:

• Reducing the possibility of any interruption in regular business processes using proper risk management.
• Minimizing the impact of interruption, if any.
• Teaching the staff their roles and responsibilities in such a situation to safeguard their own security and other interests.
• Handling any potential failure in supply chain system, to maintain the natural flow of business.
• Protecting the business from failure and negative publicity.
• Protecting customers and maintaining customer relationships.
• Protecting the prevalent and prospective market and competitive advantage of the business.
• Protecting profits, revenue and goodwill.
• Setting a recovery plan following a disruption to normal operating conditions.
• Fulfilling legislative and regulatory requirements.

Traditionally a business continuity plan would just protect the data center. With the advent of technologies, the scope of a BCP includes all distributed operations, personnel, networks, power and eventually all aspects of the IT environment.

Phases of BCP

The business continuity planning process involves recovery, continuation, and preservation of the entire business operation, not just its technology component. It should include contingency plans to protect all resources of the organization, e.g., human resource, financial resource and IT infrastructure, against any mishap.

It has the following phases:

• Project management & initiation
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
• Recovery strategies
• Plan design & development
• Testing, maintenance, awareness, training

Project Management and Initiation

This phase has the following sub-phases:

• Establish need (risk analysis)
• Get management support
• Establish team (functional, technical, BCC – Business Continuity Coordinator)
• Create work plan (scope, goals, methods, timeline)
• Initial report to management
• Obtain management approval to proceed

Business Impact Analysis

This phase is used to obtain formal agreement with senior management for each time-critical business resource. This phase has the following sub-phases:

• Deciding maximum tolerable downtime, also known as MAO (Maximum Allowable Outage)
• Quantifying loss due to business outage (financial, extra cost of recovery, embarrassment), without estimating the probability of kinds of incidents, it only quantifies the consequences
• Choosing information gathering methods (surveys, interviews, software tools)
• Selecting interviewees
• Customizing questionnaire
• Analyzing information
• Identifying time-critical business functions
• Assigning MTDs
• Ranking critical business functions by MTDs
• Reporting recovery options
• Obtaining management approval

Recovery Phase

This phase involves creating recovery strategies are based on MTDs, predefined and management-approved. These strategies should address recovery of:

• Business operations
• Facilities & supplies
• Users (workers and end-users)
• Network
• Data center (technical)
• Data (off-site backups of data and applications)

BCP Development Phase

This phase involves creating detailed recovery plan that includes:

• Business & service recovery plans
• Maintenance plan
• Awareness & training plan
• Testing plan

The Sample Plan is divided into the following phases:

• Initial disaster response
• Resume critical business ops
• Resume non-critical business ops
• Restoration (return to primary site)
• Interacting with external groups (customers, media, emergency responders)

Final Phase

The final phase is a continuously evolving process containing testing maintenance, and training.

The testing process generally follows procedures like structured walk-through, creating checklist, simulation, parallel and full interruptions.

Maintenance involves:

• Fixing problems found in testing
• Implementing change management
• Auditing and addressing audit findings
• Annual review of plan

Training is an ongoing process and it should be made a part of the corporate standards and the corporate culture.

 

MIS – Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and tactics across these business functions – both within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain- all coordinated to improve the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole.

In a traditional manufacturing environment, supply chain management meant managing movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-progress inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption.

It involves managing the network of interconnected smaller business units, networks of channels that take part in producing a merchandise of a service package required by the end users or customers.

With businesses crossing the barriers of local markets and reaching out to a global scenario, SCM is now defined as:

Design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally.

SCM consists of:

• operations management
• logistics
• procurement
• information technology
• integrated business operations

Objectives of SCM

• To decrease inventory cost by more accurately predicting demand and scheduling production to match it.
• To reduce overall production cost by streamlining production and by improving information flow.
• To improve customer satisfaction.

Features of SCM

Scope of SCM

SCM Processes

• Customer Relationship Management
• Customer Service Management
• Demand Management
• Customer Order Fulfillment
• Manufacturing Flow Management
• Procurement Management
• Product Development and Commercialization
• Returns Management

Advantages of SCM

SCM have multi-dimensional advantages:

• To the suppliers:
  • Help in giving clear-cut instruction
  • Online data transfer reduce paper work
• Inventory Economy:
  • Low cost of handling inventory
  • Low cost of stock outage by deciding optimum size of replenishment orders
  • Achieve excellent logistical performance such as just in time
• Distribution Point:
  • Satisfied distributor and whole seller ensure that the right products reach the right place at right time
  • Clear business processes subject to fewer errors
  • Easy accounting of stock and cost of stock
• Channel Management:
  • Reduce total number of transactions required to provide product assortment
  • Organization is logically capable of performing customization requirements
• Financial management:
  • Low cost
  • Realistic analysis
• Operational performance:
  • It involves delivery speed and consistency.
• External customer:
  • Conformance of product and services to their requirements
  • Competitive prices
  • Quality and reliability
  • Delivery
  • After sales services
• To employees and internal customers:
  • Teamwork and cooperation
  • Efficient structure and system
  • Quality work
  • Delivery