Question

1) If a company wants to implement an enterprise application, it had better do its homework. Discuss 3 implications of this statement with examples.

2) Many colleges and universities use Banner, a higher education software ERP system. Describe the ERP system at your university. How does your school's ERP compare to others, give 2 comparisons to other systems from Web searches? What are the challenges of implementing the ERP system?

Answer 1

Enterprise application:

To improve efficiency and productivity every organizations need to model the entire business processes. Enterprise Applications provide business logic and tools that helps such organization to model in the form of software solution. Examples include customer relationship and supplier relationship management systems, billing systems, Accounting, Order processing, Scheduling, Procurement etc...

• Lidl, a nationwide grocery chain has always based their systems on the price they pay for goods. SAP, was an ERP company with whom they began working together. SAP implementation had to be customized and thus set off an implementation problem. Consultancy charged high for guiding implementation. Customizations needs a huge sum and should be avoided.
• Worth & Co. is a Pennsylvania-based manufacturing company faced a great loss and sued citing the $4.5 million they paid the software giant for licenses, training and professional services.
• Revlon, the Cosmetics giant faced millions of dollars lose in sales and even the company's own stockholders sued them. Here the main reason was lack of maintenance of effective controls and of design in connection with the implementation of EA.

Apart from above example there are many examples of Enterprise application implementation resulted in disaster like that of Fox-Meyer, Vodafone etc... All this show that there is a need on clarity on requirements, need to avoid customization as it cost high, a company must discard the ERP which donot support their business processes that provided competitive advantage.