Tag: Erp System

ERP And Supply Chain Management – Generate Rapid Improvement In Business

Supply chain management is an old concept but Enterprise Resource Planning has aided in reducing the inaccuracies. ERP has increased the performance of the supply chain. ERP and Supply Chain Management is a way of planning all the resources in the business enterprise effectively. The organizations establish operating systems and operating performance which help them in managing the business operations and meet the objectives of the business. ERP and SCM includes the trading partners of the organization also which are the customers and the suppliers. It is for the companies who are looking to generate rapid improvement in their operations. The assessment of ERP and SCM depends on the size of the operations and takes about three to four days. The organization’s intent, implementation and effectiveness of the existing operations are assessed based on an ERP model.

SCM or Supply Chain Management is essential to have an edge over the competition in the market. It improves the way the organization finds raw components it requires to make a product to deliver to the customers. The components of Supply Chain Management are Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Return. Many of the SCM applications rely on the information which is with the ERP or the Enterprise Resource Planning software. ERP integrates the data in a single application and therefore benefits SCM applications. The SCM applications have a single source for the data which makes it easy. It is beneficial to implement ERP first to get the information in order. Nowadays the ERP vendors offer SCM modules too.

Investing on ERP systems provides a platform that enables effective response to the changing Supply Chain Management. An integrated ERP system can aid in improving the performance of the Supply Chain Management by achieving a global visibility. It is essential to optimize the investment on inventory and offer great customer service in today’s market. It is important to know about the inventory throughout the Supply Chain and this data is available with an ERP system. The manufactures can develop the best plan for production and make only what is required by having the knowledge of the inventory location and availability. This information also helps to provide the customers with inventory and product availability information. Real time data helps to make quick and correct decisions with the help of ERP.

ERP and SCM work together by developing a better customer interaction. It is important to know about the views of the customer and to obtain such information one needs to interact with the customer. This data can be achieved from different sources such as sales, marketing and supply chain systems. ERP offers this integrated view and helps the manufacturers to understand the customer needs better. They can provide better products and services which help the company to increase its profits. ERP and Supply Chain Management help in lean manufacturing, supplier integration and global sourcing. It helps to achieve a higher performance as the measurement and performance are linked together. ERP systems include analytics which enable to standardize metrics thereby bringing about speed and better quality.

Peter Filinovich PhotoAbout Author
Read about Types of ERP. Also know What is ERP System. Read information about Importance of Communication in Business.

Supply Chain ERP Selection Tools

Ten Steps Guide to Selecting the Right WMS Software


This concise, step-by-step guide will help you organize your software selection process from initial research to contract negotiation.
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Is Software as a Service (SaaS) Right for Your Warehouse?


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Enterprise Warehouse Management Comparison Guide


Select the right warehouse management software by using this detailed side-by-side comparison of leading WMS systems.
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Small and Mid-Size Warehouse Management Comparison


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Top Trends in Warehouse Management Software


Learn the top 10 trends to consider when evaluating WMS software. Our experts created this guide to get you up to speed quickly.
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How to Assess Warehouse Management Vendors' Viability


Use this viability guide to make sure the software company you choose will be in business to provide support and upgrades for years to come.
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Ten Steps Guide to Selecting the Right SCM Software


This concise, step-by-step guide will help you organize your software selection process from initial research to contract negotiation.
( 13 Pages PDF)

ERP System

ERP System

“ERP System” is a way of describing Enterprise Resource Planning. An ERP System is a set of people, process and technology that enable an business to optimize and fully utilize all of their resources. So often people think of an ERP System as simply a software package. But it is much more. Let’s look at some of the aspects of a true ERP System.

ERP System Explained

If you consider all of the aspects of an ERP System, you must look at the parts of the business from a process perspective. Take for example a process of “Order-to-Cash”. This process follows the concept of taking an order for a product, checking and requisitioning inventory, preparing it for shipment, and shipping it out. Then it is invoiced, and ultimately the invoice is paid.

If you map out the Order-to-Cash process in your organization, you will likely find a lot of inefficiencies. You don’t want to automate these inefficiencies. That would only make the inefficiencies faster. So you should first look at the system of people, processes and then ultimately automate it with technology.

So your ERP System is all of the inputs and outputs to the process of taking an order and processing it through until your receive payment for that order. Take for example the Order process. The input is the order itself. The output may be the printed order or the picklist for pulling the inventory. This order is input and processed by an order entry clerk. You can see in this simple example the process of taking the order (input) and generating a picklist (output) as the first step in your order-to-cash processs.

Where possible an ERP System drives data inputs to their source. That is why Internet-based shopping carts and order systems are becoming essential. The customer is the source of the data, so they should be the source of the input into the system. You can see the beginning of a supply chain where the customer pulls inventory from the company, who then pulls inventory from a supplier. This customer, processor, supplier model repeats again and again, in both a micro level and a macro level. The order entry station is the micro level processor in the above example, and the distribution company is the macro level processor in the larger picture. You can take any process and look at the input (or the customer pull) and see what makes up the transaction, and who is the supplier for the process.

The ERP System is a many operational and financial processes that are run by people to fulfill the supply and demand of the process and ultimately streamlined and enabled by technology

Steps to improving your ERP System before automating

There are a number of things you can do, but the obvious first thing is to identify your processes and systems. Tools such as Lean Enterprise (or Lean Manufacturing) can help you reduce and eliminate waste in your processes. Based on the Toyota Production system, Lean is a very effective way to reduce wasted efforts, reduce costs, and improve your throughput.

Another area to look at is improving quality. Quality methods and tools can greatly increase your bottom line when properly applied. ISO9000 and similar certifications are both effective at communicating a message internally and externally, that only high quality products and services will be tolerated.

Scaling these two system improvements upon a well matched business software system will create a world-class organization. Key to finding a software to support your ERP System is matching your processes and key functions to an ERP Software solution.

Resources for Improving your ERP System

The first thing you should check out is ERPandmore.com’s free ERP System Tools that you can download. These can help you better define functions within an ERP system, Vendor Evaluations, and compare competing solutions.

Some other resources you should look to include the American Production and Inventory Control Society and the Quality Management Institute. These two organizations have a lot of publications and information about business process improvement.

With regards to the software for your ERP System, you can find a multitude of vendors in our ERP Software Directory. You can also find ERP Vendor reviews and get price quotes from SoftwareAdvice.com.

ERP System

ERP System

Enterprise 21 ERP Software Review

Enterprise 21 ERP Software is ideal for small and mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies. Enterprise 21 ERP from TGI offers a fully integrated solution that facilitates industry best practices. This robust ERP system provides a single platform to streamline business operations and gain bottom-line profitability while increasing efficiency. With a flexible and customizable architecture, this system can meet any company’s unique business requirements.


Enterprise 21 is a one-source solution for process, discrete and mixed-mode manufacturing environments. Lot tracking and traceability, formulas and recipe functionalities, scalable batches, compliance management and quality control make Enterprise 21 an ideal manufacturing software system for process manufacturers. Product configuration, inventory management, Bill of Materials and component substitution functionalities are offered within the system for discrete manufacturers.
Enterprise 21 ERP Software
In addition to full manufacturing functionality, Enterprise 21 delivers a complete distribution suite to manage wholesale distributors’ operations. Leveraging all of the modules included in this full ERP system, distributors can improve service, reduce costs and increase efficacy in data processing all while producing higher sales.

Integrating manufacturing and distribution modules with financial, CRM, business intelligence and warehouse management applications, Enterprise 21 fulfills all ERP needs. Backed by a customer satisfaction guarantee, the strong manufacturing execution, inventory management and accounting functionalities make Enterprise 21 a must-see for companies looking for a total package system.

Enterprise 21 ERP Software Video Review


More than simply software, Enterprise 21 offers solutions to manufacturers and distributors.

TGI has been providing ERP solutions since 1990 and has received numerous recognitions, including the Food Logistics FL100 Award for three consecutive years. Unlike many ERP systems out there, TGI delivers full in-house development, sales, implementation and support of their system. With a five concurrent user minimum, Enterprise 21 is ideal for SMBs wanting an on-premise system.

Getting Enterprise 21 ERP Software Pricing and More Information

If you would like more information on the Enterprise 21 ERP Software, please select one of the two options below:
Enterprise 21 Enterprise 21

Read other Software Reviews

Adding Value to your ERP Requirements

ERP Requirements Refinement

When you start a system selection, you first need to determine which business process are the “value add” processes. In other words, which processes in the business add to the value of the service or product you are providing to the market. The customer is only willing to pay for those activities that help you produce, ensure quality, or account for your product or service. All other activities are waste.
ERP Requirements

When defining your ERP requirements, you need to be cognizant of these “value add” activities. These are the activities that should be captured in your requirements. Non-value-add activities should not be included in your ERP requirements. These do not produce results that create additional value to the product/service and these are only distractions when it comes down to the actual implementation.

ERP Requirements and Lean

All of this comes from Lean Manufacturing or the Toyota Production method. Essentially, as stated above, you want to eliminate “Muda” or waste in the process. Many firms have successfully implemented this in their manufacturing processes, but a smaller group have implemented this Lean system in their business office processes.

Consider this example. When defining your ERP Requirements you determine that there is an accounting process that has people spending 2 man days per month reconciling the cost of keeping track of the tools used in manufacturing. Does this process add any value to the actual production of the product? Possibly, but it sounds like this process can be reworked and possibly using the new ERP system you can eliminate this process and drive the data down to the actual transactions on the shop floor. You don’t need accountants researching the transactions. What you might need is a system that tracks the tools and their usage as part of the production process and can give a report on what these transactions cost. These transaction costs can then be factored into the pricing of the product, without the overhead of 2 man days of reconciliation.

The time when you are defining your new ERP Requirements is the perfect time to start looking critically at your processes and keying in on what brings value to the process. Then you can design your new system (both process and software) around those items that bring value to not only the customer but also the bottom line.

Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated

Mapping your ERP requirements

When you are cataloging all of your ERP Requirements, you should write down all of your requirements (perhaps on a spreadsheet) and then give them an identifying number (such as R1, R2, R3, etc.) You can then evaluate each of these requirements with the business team to determine if the requirement is one that you want to carry forward into your deliverable of requirements that will be provided to the ERP software vendors. There is an excellent article on how to do this mapping, by author Brett Beaubouef, that describes this process.

He advocates that “Starting with the desired business results ensures that we drive to only those requirements that directly support true business value. First, it is an exercise that really puts into perspective the purpose of a business model (results). This exercise is not only useful to the project team but also the business stakeholders. Second, it is an approach that can help you justify why certain existing business activities are not being carried forward in the new business solution. Third, taking a business results oriented approach enables your project team to be more successful at focusing on the right business requirements and not wasting time on capturing requirements for non-value-add activities. ”

Another useful article that you may want to examine is the article 7 Ways to Fail in an ERP Selection

Keep in mind that some ERP Requirements that you identify may not seem valuable at first, but you need to review these requirements with the functional user team to ensure that key processes are not eliminated by mistake. There may be requirements that are a requirement because of a legal concern or perhaps a health and safety issue.

In the end, if you have successfully mapped out your business processes and defined these in your ERP Requirement list, then you will be a lot closer to selecting a system that actually functions in a way that brings value to everyone.

We hope that this will aid you in better defining your ERP Requirements.

ERP on the iPad

 

ERP on the iPad

Mobility is becoming more and more key to managing corporate information. As such, we have seen individual users moving entirely from their laptops to their iPad. This provides easy access to the internet, with information anywhere. This is especially true of cloud computing. With a simple iPad, you can access anything anywhere.

ERP on the iPad can be used in Sales with CRM solutions. In fact, Salesforce.com has a native iPhone app that works on the IPAD, but bother, when you can use it on the web browser just as well? Many ERP solutions now have an html interface, so using the iPad is quite easy.

Examples of ERP on the iPad

Imagine if you will, a manager of a manufacturing plant browsing the production cells and being able to pull up real-time stats on her/his iPad and having the ability to discuss the results with the employees?

Or take an example of an HR Manager in an interview with a candidate in a random conference room, looking up on their iPad the available job postings for other divisions to better suit the candidate at hand.

Working on a campus environment, many times managers are running to meetings between buildings. Carrying an iPad with access to the ERP data is most convenient. These are just a few examples of mobility with ERP on the iPad.

So if these things are now possible, is it possible to run a Terminal Emulation program on the iPad to connect to a legacy ERP on the iPad? As far as we can tell, yes you can do that as there a number of Terminal Emulation programs for the iPhone and iPad. Are these as convenient as a web or even a native iPad app? Probably not, but it can be done.

ERP on the iPad on the Road

What about remote access to the central ERP system? Can you use an iPad while on the road to access your corporate data? Well that really depends upon if you have access via Virtual Private Networking (VPN) to the corporate network. You can setup VPN on the iPad and use it to connect securely to the corporate system. But it does require some setup. If the ERP has a web interface and it is exposed on the public web, then you can log in directly there. This is the easiest for the user, but requires additional layers of security from the IT department.

Security for ERP on the iPad

A key are of concern would be for ERP on the iPad to be able to wipe data for lost iPads. In other words, you’re at an airport. You turn around for a moment and your iPad is gone. You know it was on the seat next to you for a second. You have saved your passwords and access to all your corporate data is gone.

As it is now, the only thing you can do is to set a password and in the iPad’s settings, you can set it to wipe the data after so many bad attempts at the password. Of course, you have a copy on your computer in your iTunes right? So this is one method, but for the release of corporate data being accessible through the iPad, currently, you would probably be using a web browser.

If corporate ERP software providers come out with a dedicated App for their product specifically for the iPad, then they would need to build in some sort of password protection. This will not prevent the iPad from being accessed though, so Apple needs to come out with a function similar to what is available with the iPhone, to wipe corporate data. Without this, there probably won’t be a widespread migration to the iPad until this feature is available.

To summarize, it is possible now to use the iPad for mobile ERP access provided that the ERP is exposed to the Internet or by way of some sort of VPN. But it is probably not the most elegant solution, especially on older ERP systems. Ideally, ERP vendors will start to come out with native applications for the iPad which will ease the complexity for the user. This is already happing with cloud based providers. We hope that it will become more prevalent in the near future.

What do you think? Are you using the ERP on the iPad now? Please post your comments and let us know. Thank you.

Addendum: After posting this, we saw this press release about an iPad Enterprise Development kit for putting ERP on the iPad.

Click here to get great Ipad Training

 

ERP on the iPad.

How to determine your ERP Evaluation Criteria

Defining your ERP Evaluation Criteria is essential for paring down the vendors and getting to the final choice.  There are two focus areas for determining your selection criteria:

ERP Evaluation Criteria

Determining your ERP Evaluation Criteria

1. ERP Evaluation Criteria – Process

The Process analysis for determining your ERP Evaluation Criteria is the method you would use to determine the flow of data through the system and how it would follow along your established or to-be business processes.  For example, following a process flow of quoting an order, receiving the order, manufacturing or purchasing the product, shipping, and finally invoicing the order is known as the order-to-cash process flow.

There are other anther ERP Evaluation Criteria processes such as procure-to-pay, which maps the inventory requirement through the accounts payable billings. Another example could be the HR process of recruiting though retirement.

ERP Evaluation Criteria

Using Process Flow documentation to determine your ERP Evaluation Criteria

By mapping out these processes in a tool such as Microsoft Visio Standard 2010ERP Evaluation Criteria and developing a detailed flow diagram, you will have a good understanding of how your business operates.  With this knowledge, your evaluation of various business management software will be a lot easier.  Further, you can see how closely the software’s process flow mirrors your company’s or how disjointed the software is when it comes to your business.

2. ERP Evaluation Criteria – Functional

ERP Evaluation Criteria for the system is the detailed list of all of the things you need the system to do, from processing purchase orders, processing a sales order, to invoicing a client and producing financial reports.  These are the nitty gritty things that your system should do.  A good place to start is to evaluate your current system.  What are the functions that the current system does well?  Include these in your list.  What are the things that your system does poorly, include the desired functionality in your list.

Your list should not be 10,000 lines, but rather it should look at those items that make your business unique.  For example, most every business has to cut A/P checks.  So most systems can do that.  So do not list as a requirement that the software should be able to cut A/P checks, rather make your requirement specific to your company, such as “System should be able to cut 3 copy laser checks, with reprint capability.”  That very specific requirement will help you distinguish the vendors from one another.

A good place to start is with an ERP Evaluation Criteria Template.  ERPandMore has many different templates to assist you in evaluating various ERP software venders and have best practices built in.  In using these as a starting point, you will save yourself countless hours in both preparing these criteria templates as well as in differentiating the vendors your are looking at. We hope this has helped to answer How to determine your ERP Evaluation Criteria

ERP Disaster Recovery

ERP Disaster Recovery

One of the most critical plans you can make is to prepare for the worst, especially when it comes to your enterprise software system and the database of all of the company’s critical information. A proper disaster recovery plan is essential, if you are running an ERP system, as it touches all aspects of the company. The plan can be as simple as a backup and recovery strategy, or as extensive as a global hot site fail-over plan. In either case, you need to prepare and test your plan.
ERP disaster recovery
Testing the plan is often where people fail. You often plan for the eventuality of a hard drive crash (and thus you use a RAID array), or you plan for the possibility of natural disaster, but what if you have a hidden hardware problem that is corrupting the database a little at a time?

That happened with one company we worked with. A failing motherboard caused problems with the email virus scanner, which in turn corrupted the email store a little at a time, so that it was unrecoverable. What do you do then? Well, in that case it was restore to the point in time that the email store database was usable. So the net impact was a few weeks of data loss. That is one illustration, but what happens if something like that occurs in your ERP database? Again the key is backups.

If backups are so critical, then why do people choose not to bother with testing and restoring them? This is a key concept in ERP Disaster Recovery. Many people happily back up night after night, but never try to restore a data file or much less a database. Is it too expensive to have a test server? The real question is it too expensive to not have your ERP data after a disaster? What is the company worth? Millions? A few thousand dollars for a test environment seems like a reasonable investment.

Key ERP Disaster Recovery Priorities

Here are some of the things you need to think through when planning for ERP Disaster Recovery:

1. Backups and Recovery procedures
2. Off-site storage of backup media
3. Security of backup media
4. Remote site backups (In a disaster, can you get the business up if the server site is destroyed?)
5. Personnel (In a disaster, can the right people be there to recover?)
6. Priority levels and potential downtime acceptability
7. Costs

ERP Disaster Recovery Resources

There are some excellent disaster recovery resources on the web on this topic. One article that we liked was on making proper backups for your ERP system. We would suggest that you invest the time to learn more about this topic before it bites you. Remember that disaster always strikes at the most inconvenient time, so make the time now.

ERP Disaster Recovery ERP Disaster Recovery

How to Select and Implement an ERP System

How to Select and Implement an ERP System
Michael Burns
WHAT IS ERP?

ERP is a term that is widely used yet probably not well understood. It stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and although it was initially targeted to manufacturing companies, today it encompasses any product that can be used across an enterprise. When implemented effectively, ERP enables companies to break down traditional organizational silos, replacing them with a tightly integrated horizontal structure in which strategy, organizational structure, process and technology are closely aligned. Applications can include financial, distribution, manufacturing, human resources, payroll, and project costing.

There is a lot of confusion between an accounting system and ERP. In the past, an accounting system was limited to just Continue reading How to Select and Implement an ERP System