It Admin

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Operations Mgmt and Operations Systems |

Production Scheduling and Control |

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ITM436Module 1 CaseTrident University International Dr. Tom Swanson |

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I would like you to imagine a company as huge as Microsoft, which has numerous departments and within each department there are sub-departments communicating with each other via manual runner. What I mean is if the receptionist greeted a prospective client, conducted an entrance interview to acquire information which the entire Microsoft company would use at some stage, then she breaks the information down into the appropriate sections to deliver, then summoned runners for each department, disseminated the information and told everyone to deliver the information to the appropriate section and complete the task at hand. How well do we believe that process would work? It wouldn’t. That’s because trying to get information to multiple departments which relies on each other to integrate the total process works best if the information can be gathered and disseminated collectively to integrate so the end result is complete productivity. That is the difference ERP systems contribute to the business world.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been around for many years and have gotten much notoriety of late. ERP systems are software which “attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs.” (Wailgum, 2008) This of course seems difficult to say the least. Imagine many different departments within the same company knowing exactly what is going on with each other in real time down to the keystroke. This is efficiency at its best. So, in the above scenario you may be able to visualize how important and beneficial this could be.

We’ve taken a look at an actual case example given as we describe how Carl Hansen Products turned his company around with an ERP System....