Barriers Of Extended Supply Chain Practices

Assessment of Organizational Performance

Discuss About The Barriers Of Extended Supply Chain Practices.

This essay includes a detailed assessment of how organizations in today’s dynamic market field shape their organizational performance. The essay also sheds light on the major market drivers in the businesses that are usually considered when applying supply chain management system. In addition, the essay also includes a relevant discussion on the change management considerations for an effective implementation of enterprise management system.  The purpose of the report is to evaluate the current business practices, which includes three relevant aspects –enterprise contributing to organizational performance, market drivers for adopting supply chain and change management consideration.

Enterprise systems are implemented in several organizations to support the major process such as finance, supply chain, production, distribution, material management and other relevant aspects. Several organization have applied ES technology to enhance inter-business unit integration and develop operational efficiencies and maximize organizational effectiveness[1]. Enterprise system helps to necessitate implementation or the alignment of different work streams across the organizational boundaries to gain a seamless integration[2]. It is also identified that collaborative tools of enterprise system play a very significant role in processing the business activities as well as translating the business objectives of the organization.

Enterprise Systems remain as the integral substance, monetary and information that flows through a set of integrated implementation method[3]. So, these are implemented to support organization in an integrated manner; thereby, ERPs are called managerial tools, which are linked to organization’s process of operating and managing. Particularly, ERP helps to store or keep business data in a usable format; this helps the organization to enhance customer experience by having a data stored in a way that can be easily used and analyzed. In addition, ES also helps to automate customer service process for employees; thereby, by implementing this ES, the organization can gain major benefits by streamlining their customer service experience.

Particularly, ERP system enable the businesses to create an automated their customer service process, which ensures that each organizational member is providing a consistent experience to customer and this also ensures that back office function that are streamlined as possible. ERP helps to increase the reliability of IT infrastructure required for customer service[4]. This means that the implementation of ES, the overall organizational system will have a larger uptime, which ensures that IT functions are gather data appropriately and running properly. For example, in the case of Apple, ERP implementation such as SAP required a proper and solid corporate strategy effectively deal with the competitive pressure. So, Apple paid attention to the intersection IT as well as business strategy. Hence, IT, ERP and SAP strategies intersect to enable corporate strategy.  

Role of Enterprise Systems in Organizational Growth

For measuring the contribution of ES, it is essential for the organizations to assess the performance after the implementation.  The organizations should focus on some key areas such as reduction of operation cost; this means the firms should check where the ERP system eventually is able to reduce the cost of operation. The firms should have more of its budget free to maximize customer service capability. It should measure the performance of customer service department with the performance reported by traditional services before. Likewise, organization also needs to monitor whether the employees are receiving data or information from the usable format and the employees have the access to retrieve the information quickly when answering customer queries. On the other side, if ARS (Attendance Recording System) is installed to measure and monitor employee attendance; thereby to measure the results here, organization needs to check whether employee attendance is accurately checked and recorded for the calculation of payable days.

Among the several drivers, there are major drivers such as production inventory, transportation, facilities and location. Supply chain capabilities are usually guided by the decision the businesses make about the five drivers mentioned. The decision made about how each driver will run or influence will determine the blend of responsive and efficacy, which the supply chain has to achieve the business goals. The following framework is formed by integrating the supply chain drivers to identify the supply chain capabilities.

Production: Production remains as responsiveness by developing factors that have extending excess capacity as well as use flexible manufacturing techniques to deliver a large range of items. In order to become more responsive, an organization can make by using or running operation in several smaller plants that remain close to a group of customers, which would help to shorten the deliver items. When the efficiency is highly necessary, the organizations can develop factories with limited capacity and make those factories customized for delivering a constrained range of items[6].

Inventory- Responsiveness in this driver can be brought about by bringing or stocking a high range of inventory for a large range of products. Hence, the extending responsiveness can be obtained by stocking products at many locations just to have inventory close to customers. Efficiency in inventory management may call for a minimization in the inventory levels of all goods[7]. It is also identified that economies of scale and cost savings can be kept in place by increasing or stocking inventory in few central locations such as in a regional distribution centre.

Evaluation of Market Drivers for Applying Supply Chain Management Systems

Location: The decision of an appropriate location must emphasize on the responsiveness, which should be done when an organization develops or builds several locations that are close its customer base. For example, the organization Dell, for each market, it builds a separate location but this production location is in the market only, where it operates. Dell runs its operation in Texas city, and thereby, it has developed its production location in the Texas, which is near to their customer base. Hence, Dell operating from a few locations nd centralizing the activities in the cpmmon location achieves the efficiency.

Transformation:  Effectiveness of this driver is usually achieved with the help of  a proper transportation mode that is flexible and fast such as airplanes for global market and trucks for the regional areas[8]. On the other side, it is also observed that many organizations that sell products the through catalogs or on the Internet are having the ability to deliver high levels of responsiveness through a transportation mode within 24 hours. Hence, FedEx and UPS are the major third party organizations that provide responsive transportation services.

Information: The capability of this driver grows stronger with time because the technology for gathering and sharing information becomes easier and they wide spread. Information like money is very relevant commodity and it can be implemented to improve the performance of other supply chain drivers[9].  In addition, a high level of responsiveness is achieved when the organizations start collecting and sharing timely data with the operation of other four drivers.

When adopting an enterprise system, it is necessary for the organizations to prepare the base for a change management consideration. According to the principle of system theory of change management, applying change to one particular sector of the organization can change the other functions.  For example, a furniture manufacturing company buys 100 pieces of glasses from its supplier and now the supplier increases the price, the manufacturing company’s cost structure will be changed. Hence, to resolve the issue, the either organization have to switch to another supplier or change the entire cost structure before and then buys the glasses with newly increased price.

Therefore, for a successful implementation of enterprise system, the organizations have to make pre-considerations. For example, if an organization wants to install Attendance recording system as the part of ERP implementation, the organization mist have to inform and train its employees about the use of the system to avoid failure in the process. However, resistance to change is a common incident that happens in the internal organizational environment[10]. Thus, before implementing ES, organizational leaders must have to communicate with the employees of each level of management to gain employee coordination and to make the change happen. The organizational members should know each piece of information about the ERP installation such as the purpose of ERP adoption, its use and benefits. Thereby, the organization can obtain positive result from adoption of enterprise system.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be ascertained that enterprise system is emerged from the changing business environment, where technology plays a great role.  In order to speed up the operation and production, the organizations are relying on new trends like Enterprise System but this ES is a part of this changing business environment. Appropriate implementation of this system certainly provides a desired outcome to thee organization.

References

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