Why ERP is required, it is important and should be done at this time?

A_1-3 why ERP is required, it is important and should be done at this time?

1. We need an infrastructure that offers high availability and redundancy in order to provide 24x7 supports for our operations.
2. Business managers and boards demanding better returns from IT investments. So we have to have a well known system.
3. There is concern over the generally increasing level of IT expenditure. We have to implement such a system with the lowest total cost of ownership.
4. The need for organizations to assess how they are performing against generally accepted standards and against their peers is essential.
5. We have no more time and money to re-invent the wheels.
6. We can control costs by reducing dependency on technology experts
7. We can increase the potential to utilize less-experienced staff if properly trained
8. We have to make it easier to leverage external assistance
9. There is a chance to overcome vertical silos and nonconforming behaviour
10. Reducing risks and errors could save our survival
11. This system could help us to improve quality
12. Integrated systems help us to improving the ability to manage and monitor the enterprise
13. Costs reduction could be achieved by increasing standardization
14. We have to used of IT to optimize management of work and resources
15. There is a potential to reduce or eliminate non-value added work by reducing interfaces and hand offs
16. Jobs and roles can be enhanced via expanded information access. Integrated systems expand information access
17. This system focuses on processes. So functional boundaries dissolve as processes become the focus
18. Authority and responsibility move to the front line along with information. This system brings your information in hands
19. Changes to business needs and additional technologies/capabilities can be embraced in an accelerated fashion
20. The entire enterprise shares the same set of database information (parts in stock, material masters, production plans, maintenance costs, customers, vendors, etc.)
21. We have to replace legacy systems with new systems because of low effectiveness and maintenance costs
22. Processes' standardization and simplification instead of personal approach to processes
23. By implementing ERP we can benefit from companies best practices
24. With this system we adopt ourselves with global systems and can compete in the market
25. We have to reorganize our structures because of survival
26. Because there is a central database of information, the need to re-enter duplicate information into separate systems is eliminated

Help reduce operating costs

1. ERP software attempts to integrate business processes across departments onto a single enterprise-wide information system.
2. The major benefits of ERP are improved coordination across functional departments and increased efficiencies of doing business.
3. The immediate benefit from implementing ERP systems we can expect is reduced operating costs, such as lower inventory control cost, lower production costs, lower marketing costs and lower help desk support costs.

Facilitate Day-to-Day Management

• ERP systems offer better accessibility to data so that management can have up-to-the-minute access to information for decision-making and managerial control.
• ERP software helps track actual costs of activities and perform activity based costing.

Support Strategic Planning

• Strategic Planning is "a deliberate set of steps that assess needs and resources; define a target audience and a set of goals and objectives; plan and design coordinated strategies with evidence of success; logically connect these strategies to needs, assets, and desired outcomes; and measure and evaluate the process and outcomes."
• Part of ERP software systems is designed to support resource-planning portion of strategic planning.

The Competitive Business Environment and the Emerging Digital Firm

• Four powerful worldwide changes have altered the business environment.

Emergence of the Global Economy

• Today, information systems provide the communication and analytical power that firms need for conducting trade and managing business on a global scale. Globalization and information technology also bring new threats to domestic business firms.

Transformation of Industrial Economies

• In a knowledge and information, based economy; knowledge and information are key ingredients in creating wealth. Knowledge and information are becoming the foundation for many new services and products.

Transformation of the Business Enterprise

• The traditional business firm was and still is a hierarchical, centralized, structured arrangement of specialist that typically relied on a fixed set of standard operating procedures to deliver a mass-produced product.

The Emerging Digital Firm

• The intensive use of information technology in business firms since the mid 1990s, coupled with equally significant organizational redesign, created the condition for a new phenomenon in industrial society. The digital firm is organization where nearly all significant business processes and relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled, and key corporate assets are managed through digital means. Business processes refer to the unique ways in which organizations coordinate and organization work activities, information, and knowledge to produce a product or service.