Enterprise resource planning (ERP): concepts, questions, projects

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the management of core business processes, often in real-time and helped by software and technology.

SAP is a popular ERP Software that offers a wide range of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications including customer relationship management (CRM), financial management, human capital management, product lifecycle management, and supply chain management.

Questions and Answers

Management (BBA / MBA) questions on this topic:

Q) “What brought us here will not take us there!” Mr. Kale started the annual review meeting with this statement. Being a Founding Director of Indictrans Pvt. Ltd., Mr. Kale was well aware of efforts put over years by all managers participating in this meeting. With these efforts, Indictrans Pvt. Ltd. has become one of the largest service providers for open source ERP software called ERPNext. Mr. Kale now wants its company to grow further at faster rate by entering new markets and channels.
a. What action items would you recommend to Mr. Kale for aggressive growth of Indictrans Pvt. Ltd.?
b. Which ERP trends will you recommend to Indictrans Pvt. Ltd. to focus on for its future growth?

You are invited to a travel agency firm, to make a presentation on benefits of ERP for them. Explain the key points. Which one would be the most important benefit of ERP that you would emphasize?

Question. Suthar Timber Merchants in Patiala, India, features a large selection of building supplies, including timber, fencing and decking, moldings, hardwood flooring, sheet materials, windows, doors, ironmongery, and other materials. The prices of building materials are constantly changing. When a customer asks about the price on fixtures, fittings, hangings, and other items, sales representatives consult a manual price sheet and then call the supplier for the most recent price. The supplier in turn uses a manual price sheet, which has been updated each day. Often, the supplier must call back Suthar’s sales reps because the company does not have the newest pricing information immediately on hand. Assess how the use of ERP systems/ software can help the business improve their situation. Identify the cons of implementing the ERP solution/ software solution for Suthar Timber Merchants do to avoid a failure in the implementation.

Q) Nutrilite Health company (NHC) offers a wide variety of health products. Their company’s products continually compete with other companies’ products for shelf space and sales. Currently, NHC’s employees perform every business task by either passing paper, or calling each other on the telephone. As with “standard”, traditional business processes, there are usually traditional company structures that back up those processes. NHC’s structure contains a Corporate HQ (CHQ), distributed processing plants, distributed sales regions, and a centralized marketing group. The use of slow business processes, and subsequent slow data communication has affected the orders for health products. Sales representatives place orders through mail or by fax. Twenty workers at CHQ open, sort, and enter 500,000 orders per week into the system. This information is transmitted daily from the Central Marketing Facility to a minicomputer at each of Nutrilite’s processing sites. This daily order specifies the total demand for each processing center. The processing center then produces the amount of health products ordered and ships out the orders. Shipping managers at the processing centers assign the shipments to various transportation carriers, who deliver the product to receiving warehouses located in the regions. Some sales representatives have more than eighty customers. NHC has been struggling lately to deal with the competition because of the “old school” methods of performing day-to-day tasks and activities.

Discuss how integration of all the departments could help the organization to deal with competition.

Q.3. Vedant hospital is the provider of healthcare in West India. It wants to look for an integrated system to manage the full patient lifecycle from registration, screening, ongoing healthcare to satisfaction surveys. The hospital wishes to use the real-time patient records to streamline processes and improve patient experience, measure patient relations thereby improve the quality of care. It also wants to provide an online patients’ self-service portal ensuring patients can freely manage their own relationships with their healthcare provider. It aims to integrate all the core business processes to get better insights, have better control over the financials, automate orders and invoices, manage inventory.

a) What are the factors the management must keep in mind while selecting a vendor for the integrated system.
b) In your opinion, what are the factors that influence the performance of ERP systems in the post implementation phase? Give a justification for the top selected factor.

Q) A NGO has asked you to evaluate open source ERP software. They specifically wish to know whether open source software will be free for them or they will need to spend money. Share executive summary of your report.

“We are very happy with our ERP software but that should not stop us from looking for more automation. I am told that ERP-II should be our next step. I have called this meeting to understand from each one of you how you see this matter.” Dr. Parab was very enthusiastic about further automation in the company, which he founded ten years back. Parab Transport Solutions Pvt. Ltd. provides on-hire cabs to IT and ITES companies for their employees working during odd hours. The ERP implementation done three years back, helped this company significantly. The ERP implementation company has now approached Dr. Parab with a proposal to implement ERP-II modules such as CRM and SRM.
a. Explain how CRM can help Parab Transport Solutions Pvt. Ltd.?
b. Explain how SRM can help Parab Transport Solutions Pvt. Ltd.?

Q) You have been assigned as a project manager to deploy ERP System in a new start-up company having multi-location in India, with standalone and disparate systems. This company has manual processes, a high dependency on people for information, leading to a delay in timely decision making. The organization has embarked on a journey to implement ERP system-duly integrating all process and functions for quality transactions and availability of information.

a. Elaborate the steps you would take for effective implementation.
b. What are the critical issues that you need to address for the successful implementation of ERP?

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