Question
1) Should the company use an ERP package or specific manufacturing production planning utilities?
2) What are the advantages and disadvantages of each course of action?
3) Identify the candidate pool of software you considered for selection, select a single product, and justify your reasoning. Some of those for consideration may include the following: SAP, i2, Seibel, and SAS for the larger ERP/CRM/SCM vendors. Alternatively, Production Scheduling, RSS Solutions, Preactor International, or others.
Answer
Production Planning & Heuristics
Being aware of your production plan as a manager or a supervisor of a business is essential and helps you to buy successfully or sell your products and services with ease. A production method keeps a company organized, on top of things and ensures that one is successful when executing their daily chores (Sumner, 2007). A production plan is an attempt to put some system into each month, week and day. What defines a successful business and unsuccessful business is the way we all plan our time. Controlling how much a company spends a day may be difficult but a manager can control how he spends his money. In the same way, he is supposed to monitor and plan for all funds and time to ensure nothing goes to waste. The goal of the production plan is to plan and manage your day so that one can not only enjoy but also get the maximum out of it.
Enterprise resource planning is more than just a technology that automates the process of the enterprises it is also a solution to run the business transactions more efficient and beneficial. Implementation of enterprise resource planning not only changes the technical layer of the entity but also changes the mission layer of the organization. It offers the best solutions for most business. On the other hand, precise production planning utilities are particular software implement by a team to perform a specific task. In most cases, this software is designed as per the requirement of the organization especially production capacity of a firm. This software varies from one company to another mainly due to the size of the enterprise (Wagner, 2008).
Question 1
Should the company use an ERP package or specific manufacturing production planning utilities?
In our case, using enterprise resource management would prove to be the best move for the business. From the information provided, it is evident that the current production planning capacities do not have the capability to run the business. The following are some of the uses of ERP that can help our ailing company to meet the required production capacity.
- Integrating different software for various processes- having different production systems for different processes in your business may prove hectic. When multiple fronts- and back-end systems run separately, it can wreak havoc on the processes that are meant to ensure that the company is running smoothly. ERP integrates this software so that a business runs on a single database and this increases the efficiency and effectiveness of business.
- Provides easy access to information about the firm- implementing ERP ensures that the pace of the firm is faster than ever since this system provides all employees with secure access to business information. Moreover, it provides your managers with a holistic view of the firm whenever they need, and staffs have ready information to guide them to perform their duties.
- Eradicates the sufferings that are experienced by sales persons and customers- when sales, inventory and customer data are maintained separately, it can create havoc in the entity especially if accidentally the staffs fall short of as popular product, sales will take a big blow, and your customer will be really disappointed (Gronau, 2010).
- Eradicates complexity and time consuming in a company’s I.T- customizing a company’s systems, integrating them and maintaining them can be a nightmare to most entities but with ERP life is easy as it removes all these kinds of patchworks at lower costs.
Question 2
Advantages of enterprise resource planning
- Efficiency- it eliminates repetitive processes and greatly reduces the need to enter manually information into systems.
- Integrated information- rather than having data distributed throughout some databases, it stores this data in a single station.
- Reporting- it helps to make and customize reports.
- Customer services- make it easy to provide high-quality customer service.
- Security- it improves the security, accuracy and consistency of a company’s data.
Disadvantages of enterprise resources planning
- Cost- the cost of implementing and maintaining ERP may be high, and thus, most of the organizations may lack the capacity to implement it.
- Time consumption- ERP systems take a period of 1-4 years after its deployment to get completed and fully functional.
- Lack of capacity- for your workers to be in a position to operate these systems, they need unique skills and this means taking them for training.
- The system breaks down- like any other human-made equipment may break down, and this signifies the loss of data or stoppage of production (Wagner, 2008).
Advantages particular manufacturing production planning utilities
- Automating schedules- it integrates production schedules for the entire company. Every units program is coordinated with another’s to meet the goals of a company.
- Adaptive programs- unforeseen circumstances can spell disaster for most of the business, but when production planning software are implemented in a company, it can adapt to these changes quickly.
- Simulated but controlled growth- production software helps to run simulations of various growth scenarios without taking unnecessary risks, and thus, the company can invest in other places while opening new branches in others (Gronau, 2010).
- Easy review of data- considering that every aspect of the production process, it is possible to review all production data and reports on everything ranging from raw materials to shipping
- Question 3
Seibel CRM software is primarily created to develop market and support customer relationship management applications. It is the world’s complete CRM solution that helps enterprises achieves maximum top-and-bottom-line growth. Such services offer great customer experience across all levels and ways. Seibel delivers a transactional, analytical and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations (Gronau, 2010). This software provides a comprehensive and on-demand CRM solution that is connected to industry requirements and offers role-based customer intelligence and prebuilt integration.
In the world today, the computer is one of the most used machines. For a computer to operate it needs both the software and the hardware. Computer software is one of the perfect examples of a product that widely uses customer relationship management. Computer software is that part of a computer system that consists of encoded information or instructions. Each client requires a different nature and kind of software depending on the nature of their businesses. Thus, Microsoft, which is the leading company in the world that produces computer software, needs to maintain all these records to match their software to customers’ needs. To be in the position to do this, the company needs to have a client relationship management. With this software, they will be able to follow instructions according to and dealing with customers complaints. Moreover, the company will maintain and track their customers (Sumner, 2007). For a firm to succeed in the implementation of software, they need first to study the software to ensure there no shortcomings that it cannot handle. Moreover, flexibility is also key to ensuring the success of business in implementing and maintaining any software.
References
Gronau, N. (2010). Enterprise Resource Planning. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsv.
Sumner, M. (2007). Enterprise resource planning. . Pearson Education.
Wagner, B. &. (2008). Enterprise resource planning. . Cengage Learning.
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