برنامه ریزی منابع سازمانی(ERP) دوم : دخالت، منافع و موانع به اشتراک گذاری اطلاعات مشترک

(ERP) II is a way of managing information and designing work processes to facilitate all of this. In sounding as profound as the concept does, it also raises a number of questions. This research seeks to establish a set of clear business benefits and impediments, hindrances to success. It initially builds this set through an extension of pertinent literature on ERP (as ERP is retained at the heart of ERP II) and through logical deduction (cause and effect) of the current (anecdotal) literature on ERP II. It then tests these sets, through an online survey, with select industry experts on ERP who are anticipated to be amongst the first to move to ERP II. The survey also gives these respondents an opportunity to add their ‘free’ thoughts to construct the ERP II involvement further. Part of this research also deals in formalising the collaborative structures suitable for ERP II. The research finds that most existing benefits/impediments of ERP can still be carried forward besides ‘new’ ones built through logical deduction. The research further finds a number of future research objectives that spawn from the respondents’ concerns. Finally, it identifies three collaborative structures suitable to aid information exchange in a real-time collaborative scenario, namely joint ventures, networks and Japanese-style ‘purchasing partnership’.

Microsoft and IBM, two of the world's best-known software companies, run most of their business on software neither of them makes, the SAP (AG) R/3 ERP package (O’Leary, 2000). Amongst the most complete current definitions of enterprise resource planning (ERP) (of the many floating around) is as stated by Wallace and Kremzar (2001): An enterprise-wide set of management tools that balances demand and supply, containing the ability to link customers and suppliers into a complete supply chain, employing proven business processes for decision making, and providing high degrees of cross-functional integration among sales, marketing, manufacturing, operations, logistics, purchasing, finance, new product development, and human resources, thereby enabling people to run their business with high levels of customer service and productivity, and simultaneously lower costs and inventories; and providing the foundation for effective e-commerce. (p. 5) This proposition could be further summarised as—ERP is a set of internal (‘enterprise-wide’) tools that facilitate better management and integration of production and other back office operations within the enterprise. These tools further provide means for effective interfacing of the aforesaid ‘better managed internal activities’ with front office jobs such as customer/supplier relationship management. This interfacing in turn assists the enterprise to open its doors for online commerce.

The Gartner Research Group (GRG) (Zrimsek, 2003) credited with ‘inventing’ the extra-enterprise notion of ERP II proposes vast changes in how a firm is likely to perceive itself in the future. Essentially, they suggest that if a firm, at the basic degree of abstraction, feels that it is a provider of goods and services then it needs to revise this thinking somewhat. It needs to understand that the supply-chain in totality is that provider of goods and services but more importantly it is the creator of customer experience. They further suggest that the future will see a firm being increasingly core-competence driven with increasing divestment of non-core activities. This would lead to a heightened supply-chain, with a multitude of firms ‘completing’ the competence to provide the aforementioned goods and services. They further propose that in this heightened environment of business distribution, the core drivers for advantage would be a heightened customer experience and product/service improvement (Zrimsek, 2003; GRG, 2000). In this light, the GRG proposes an information system policy that not only improves the operational and strategic capabilities of the firm but also improves the ability of the supply-chain to deliver faster and better. The former is done with the aid of intra-firm tools such as ERP, performance management, lifecycle management, knowledge management and so on. The latter is carried out with the aid of ‘external’ tools as SCM and supplier/customer relationship management, and through initiatives that promote Internet-based collaborative commerce. This would facilitate the entire supply-chain in opening its proverbial doors not only amongst its own members but ultimately to the end consumers as well. Two ends have always to be kept in mind while strategizing—to innovate whilst keeping the costs down and the customer experience high. This information improvement, exchange and consolidation policy, under the core-competence-based outlook of the firm as an extended enterprise, a performance-based enterprise and a real-time enterprise, is what the GRG proposes under the ERP II umbrella (Wheller, 2004; Zrimsek, 2003 and Zrimsek, 2002).