Critical Review For Business Process Management, Enterprise Information Systems, And ERP Implementation

A Critical Review on Keziere, R. (2009) ‘Prepare to Demoliosh Application Silos’

Discuss about the Critical Review for Business Process Management.

The conceptual frameworks which are being used in the business world are characterized through degree of variance. The various terminologies used in the business are different according to the scenarios in the business. Therefore, the conceptual frameworks required to be streamlined according to the nature of business and thus, various things in business could be simplified. Thus, the author tries to state that a demystification of business processes is necessary and it would improve management in the business organizations. In nutshell, business process management, enterprise application integration, and ERPs are required for the establishment of strategies in an organization according to the expectations and demands of clients (Al-Mashari, Al-Mudimigh and Zairi, 2003).

There should be a continuous growth in a business and efficiency of business should be optimized. The topic discussed by the author is in the terms of the increment of efficiency of business by increasing the efficiency of entities of business. Challenges such as competency and competition should be kept in mind while strategizing comprehensive plans for an organization. Business process management can help in dealing with these kinds of challenges. This section consists of the critical review about the author’s paper. The effectiveness of the article would be analyzed as well as discussed with the concept of business process management. The strengths and weaknesses of the article are examined (Bancroft, Seip and Sprengel, 1997).

The author starts with the concepts of business and its definitions. There are various sub-divisions and sectors in business world and hence, all theories of business are not applicable in each and every sector of business. The variations in the application of theories have undermined the perspectives of business. Other than this, the author tries to provide an idea of central repository system. Therefore, uniformity in different processes of business could be achieved through this kind of system. Further, the article shows ERP as one of the best solutions in modern business. But, the concept should be applied according to the organization. The author tries to describe the various aspects of business process management. The author emphasizes on the addition of business process management and considers it as a valuable aspect. In this way, the organization can work on the aspect of competitiveness. Moreover, ERP is valuable for business process management (Aladwani, 2001).

The article has various weaknesses and strengths. The advantages of the review are that it is focused on the role of conceptual frameworks in the world of business in current scenario. It can be considered that the perspectives which are discussed are essential for increasing the operational capacity of the business. Business process management is extensively evaluated in this article. Moreover, the evaluation for enhancing the execution of theories in the process of business in organization remains pertinent. The weaknesses of the article would include the failure of author to include case studies in the article, which shows the execution of business process management in various organizations. The author does not try to integrate empirical framework in the analysis (Berger and Luckmann, 1996).

A Critical Review of Da Xu, L. (2011) ‘Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends’

Various aspects are obvious in the analysis provided by the author. The author concentrates on the demystification of BPM. In other words, BPM encloses the foundation of strategies in an organization which would depend on the needs and demands of clients. There are many sectors in modern business world and every business theory is not applicable on every sector (Brocke, 2010).

Enterprise information system are used as the tools for the extension of business processes and integration of those processes in a business. It can be helpful in both interorganizational and intraorganizational levels. The introduction of ES has been possible due to the revolution in the field of business informatics. Global economy and advancement in the field of information technology has also been a boosting factor for enterprise systems. Manufacturing industries and services need enterpsise system for the integration of information and, information technlogy has helped enterprise systems in improving the fucntions of the industry. In earlier times, FIS (functional information system) were used for partial integration of business functions. But Enterprise sytems like ERP are used for proper business integration. In this way, businesses can achieve competitiveness, competency and efficiency. The popularity of ERPs is increasing in small and medium scale industries. The paper concentrates on the implementation of ERP and its role in organizational success in future (Carlino and Kelly, 2000).

The advancement in the field of information integration techniques in the industries have contributed immensely to the utilization of enterprise systems. Moreover, different techniques are used in examining enterprise systems. The factors used for examining ES are grid computing, service oriented architecture, enterprise application integration, workflow management and business process management. Many applications need a part of every technique and thus, it results into the increment of utilization of enterprise systems (Chakraborty and Sharma, 2007).

Thus, author has discussed the rate of acceptance of enterprise systems in today’s business world. He also  discusses about the techniques which are used for the selection ES tools in business processes. The author relates the research with the surveys focused on the field of development of enterprise systems which is related to industrial informatics (Chen, 2001).

A complete overview of enterprise systems is provided by the author in this article. Moreover, author has tried to compare industry oriented ES and ES used for general purpose. He states that ES makes sure that the information in the organization is shared among different functional areas in the organization (Da Xu, 2011). The author describes the difference between ERP and ERP III. Further, technlogies which are helping ERP systems are clearly defined in the article. Though author has not got deep into the process of data collection in business process (which is considered as the lifeline for the ES systems). The article tries to show the improvement of business process due to ERP systems and succeeded to an extent. The importance of process modeling for the process of industrial informatics is evident. The author tries to show the relationship between operations and integration of inforamtion, but could not provide accurate references for the topic. But, other techniques such as service oriented architecture and EAI are defined and discussed by the author (Davenport, 2000).

A Critical Review on Yusufa, Y., Gunasekaranb, A. and Abthorpe, M.S. (2004) ‘Enterprise Information Systems Project Implementation: A case study of ERP in Rolls-Royce’

The aim of the author to study about the recent trends related to enterprise systems is fulfilled through this article. The author, though considers different challenges regarding implementation of ES in the organizations, it is has been clearly stated that efforts are needed to improve ES and the demand of ES would be increasing in future and it will emerge as a future trend.

Active players are required in the global market so that businesses could be internationalized. The standard of operations is set through globalization of operations. Various sectors have plunged into business world and the factors of modern business warefare have increased from quality and price to competitiveness, responsiveness and flexibility. Therefore, several organizations have utilized outsourcing as an alternative and decentralized functions of their business. Hence, it comes with the difficulty of integrating or coordinating the processes in the organization. Modern technologies though help in the integration of various business  processes in an  organization. Different systems such as ERP manufacturing resource planning have been a necessary part of the organization in terms of integration. Different firms round the globe are utilizing ERP systems to re-engineer the processes in their business. They use ERP to enhance their business processes according to their requirements. The author tries to emphasize on the  execution of enterprise system project with the help of analysis of the case study of enterprise resource planning in Rolls-Royce (Aladwani, 2001).

The author has described the concepts of internationalisation and economic globalization in the beginning of the article. It has been stated in the article that the above said factors are necessary to acheive competitive edge in a business. Execution of ERP and other information system enhance integration in the business process. Though, there are business processes where execution of ERP systems have failed and the reason for failure lies on the obselete management during the execution of information systems. The paper focuses on the successful execution of ERP and the case study of Rolls-Royce was analyed in the paper (Yusufa, Gunasekaranb and Abthorpe, 2004; Holt, 1999).

The paper tries to analyze the case study in depth and tries to find out the problems, which were faced by the company during the execution of enterprise resource planning. It uses the case study methodology to find the different aspects of ERP implementation. The merits of the paper are that the authors have also discussed issues related to business, operations and work culture during the execution of ERP. They have tried to go in-depth of the issues. But, the demerit with the paper was that the difficulties related to ERP execution was narrowed down to a particular software SAP R/3 and authors failed to shed light on other software packages.

The results of the project are time constraint and require an amount of time to demonstrate results. Moreover, the sustainibility of EIS requires to be analyzed further. Further, the paper focuses on the small scale implementation of ERP. The idea of execution of ERP system in large scale is not clearly defined. Hence, in nutshell, further research should be performed for enhancing the advantages of information systems in the organization (Trunick, 1999).

In today’s generation, the information systems are becoming very important for all the organizations whether it is public or private. Now that the globalization is increasing widely, if the supply chain is complex, the organizations may need more tools to manage their activities. The fundamental tool in that case for the competitive organizations is Information System. The Enterprise resource planning is the most mentioned information system in business and research news.

ERP is an integrated system that does not require periodic updates but operates in real time.  It automatically coordinates the activities between different applications like inventory, production control and accounting departments. It uses the database technology to integrate and control all the business information like supplier, employee, product, customer and financial data.  Though Enterprise resource planning has greatly evolved and developed around the world lately, but implementing it is still a difficult task faced by the organizations. The main problems faced by the organizations are that of over budget and the time required for the implementation. Another issue noticed was that implementation of many ERP failed to achieve the expectations and targets of the organization. According to a study, 90% ERP projects in terms of project management were considered as a failure. Many companies even abandoned ERP implementation. The failure was mostly due to the difficulties faced in the implementation phase irrespective of the organization’s investment in the project. The technological related issues were not the one faced in ERP implementation but mostly human related and organization issues like organizational culture, resistance to change, project mismanagement, incompatible business processes etc.(Elbertsen and Van Reekum, 2008).

Many researches’ have been conducted lately to know about the success and failures of ERP implementation in an organization that experienced ERP implementation. A number of ERP consultants and providers were questioned about their experience of ERP implementation. The results were analyzed and suggestions were made for the improvement (Jeston, 2012).

The results concluded that there was a trade-off situation between the customization requirements and generic purpose systems related to business types and industries. Many mid-sized companies were driven towards ERP adoption due to comparison of software with the company’s business process and competitive pressure (Keziere, 2009).

Adjustment of the ERP system with respect to business reality is obvious. For small scale software packages, flexibility is difficult but large scale software packages like MySAP and Oracle offer different ways to use parameter control for processes and sometimes even industry specific solutions.

An ERP system though difficult to implement but if once implemented correctly can give many advantages and benefits by Aladwani (2001) , Al-Mashari et al. (2003) , Carlino & Kelly (2000), Chakraborty & Sharma (2007), and Elbertsen & Van Reekum (2008) saving time and expense of an organization. The decisions are made quick and with fewer errors by the management. The integration leads to many benefits like sales forecasting, order tracking, chronological history of the transactions, revenue tracking etc. ERP also centralizes business data which helps in eliminating the need to synchronize the changes and improve data security. Apart from these positive aspects, it also has some negative points which cannot be ignored like the customization is a problematic issue also, the re-engineering of business processes may affect the competitiveness or divert the focus from the critical issues that need more attention(Al-Mashari and Zairi, 2000).

The Enterprise systems (ES) has been popular in both the public and the private sector in the past decade. They were introduced in the market in the 1990s looking at the increasing tendency for globalization acquisitions and mergers and another way to improve and optimize the operations in business. The implementation of the enterprise system is very complex due to the data standardization and wide integration, adopting the best-practice models of business that involve re-engineering of business process, and lastly, the involvement of  huge number of stake holders. Few companies have gained remarkable progress in productivity and speed while others experienced failure prone implementations of ES (Bancroft, Seip and Sprengel, 1997; Berger and Luckmann, 1996; Davenport, 2000).

The referred research paper tells about the enterprise systems that were successfully re-implemented. The example has been given to illustrate is Scandinavian high tech company, which was able to implement ES successfully even after facing some problems like insufficient change management, issues in outsourcing partners and lack of support from top management. To identify the factors that were responsible for the success, Multi theory approach is used. The multi theory approach incorporates both contextual theory and institutional theory. Institutional factors have been recognized along with the mainstream list of critical success factor. The major finding that the research concluded was that the local expert’s explanation of ES implementation is of great importance. However, contextual factors cannot be ignored as well(Abdinnour-Helm, Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall, 2003; Poirier and Walker, 2005).

The most important point about the paper is that it has used Multi theory approach in order to identify the factors that contributed to the success of re-implementation of ES. The approach was supported by Chen and Rossi because of its ability to use the resources for social reform and its contribution for development of social science theory. It has coupled both the contextual and institutional theory. Also, the interpretive paradigm has been incorporated in the paper whose aim is to understand the subjective meanings of the organization. The interpretive paradigm can be used to understand the happenings in social environment and also what it is meant for the ones who are experiencing those events according to Wright and Losekoot. The use of interpretive paradigm has been helpful in collecting the information related to real time scenarios, which was necessary to analyze the institutional factors. Hence, the decision of selecting interpretive paradigm was considered a better choice(Svejvig, 2011).

The thing that was appreciated most about this paper was the idea of using deviant case study from the previous studies for identifying the factors that have influenced the enterprise system implementation. A new gateway for the future researches has been opened up by deviating from the concept of core idea. Another thing that should be taken into consideration is the Multi theory approach used in order to investigate those factors and interpretive paradigm for examining the scenarios of real time has added great value to this paper. 

References

Abdinnour-Helm, S., Lengnick-Hall, M.L. and Lengnick-Hall, C.A. (2003) ‘Pre-implementation attitudes and organizational tional readiness for implementing an enterprise resource planning system’, European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 146, no. 2, pp. 258-273.

Aladwani, A. (2001) ‘Change management strategies for successful ERP implementation’, Business Process Management, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 266-275.

Al-Mashari, M., Al-Mudimigh, A. and Zairi, M. (2003) ‘Enterprise resource planning: A taxonomy of critical factors’, European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 146, no. 2, pp. 352-364.

Al-Mashari, M. and Zairi, M. (2000) ‘The effective application of SAP R/3: A proposed model of best practice’, Logistics Information Management, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 156–166.

Bancroft, N.H., Seip, H. and Sprengel, A. (1997) Implementing SAP R/3: How to Introduce a Large System into a Large Organization, 2^nd edition, Prentice Hall.

Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1996) The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Double Day.

Brocke, J.V. (2010) International handbook on information systems, New York: Springer.

Carlino, J. and Kelly, J. (2000) AMR research predicts ERP market will reach $66.6 billion, [Online], Available: https:/www.amrresearch.com/press/files/99518.asp [12 August 2016].

Chakraborty, S. and Sharma, S.K. (2007) ‘Enterprise resource planning: an integrated strategic framework’, International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development, vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 533-551.

Chen, I.J. (2001) ‘Planning for ERP systems: Analysis and future trend’, Business Process Management Journal, vol. 07, no. 05, pp. 374–386.

Da Xu, L. (2011) ‘Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends’, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 630-640.

Davenport, T.H. (2000) ‘Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems’, Harvard Business School Press.

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Keziere, R. (2009) ‘Prepare to Demoliosh Application Silos’, Information Management, April, pp. 23-26.

Poirier, C.C. and Walker, I. (2005) Business process management applied: creating the value managed enterprise, Boca Raton: J. Ross Publishing.

Svejvig, P. (2011) ‘A Successful Enterprise System Re-Implementation Against All Odds-A Multisourcing Case Study’, Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 3-31.

Trunick, P.A. (1999) ‘ERP: Promise or pipe dream?’, Transportation & Distribution, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 23–26.

Yusufa, Y., Gunasekaranb, A. and Abthorpe, M.S. (2004) ‘Enterprise information systems project implementation: A case study of ERP in Rolls-Royce’, International Journal of Production Economics, vol. 87, no. 3, pp. 251-266.