4. How do enterprise applications, collaboration and communication systems, and intranets improve organizational performance?
Explain how enterprise applications improve organizational performance.
An organization operates in an ever-increasing competitive and global environment. The successful organization focuses on the efficient execution of its processes, customer service, and speed to market. Enterprise applications provide an organization with a consolidated view of its operations across different functions, levels, and business units. Enterprise applications allow an organization to efficiently exchange information among its functional areas, business units, suppliers, and customers.
Define enterprise systems and describe how they change the way an organization works?
Enterprise systems integrate the key business processes of an organization into a single central data repository. This makes it possible for information that was previously fragmented in different systems to be shared across the firm and for different parts of the business to work more closely together.
This changes the work flow of an organization:
• Information flows seamlessly throughout an organization, improving coordination, efficiency, and decision making.
• Gives companies the flexibility to respond rapidly to customer requests while producing and stocking only that inventory necessary to fulfill existing orders.
• Increases customer satisfaction by improving product shipments, minimizing costs, and improving a firm’s performance.
• Improves decision making by improving the quality of information for all levels of management. That leads to better analyses of overall business performance, more accurate sales and production forecasts, and higher profitability.
Define supply chain management systems and describe how they benefit businesses.
In short, supply chain management systems help businesses better manage relationships with their suppliers. Objective of SCM: get the right amount of products from the companies’ source to their point of consumption with the least amount of time and with the lowest cost. SCM provide information to help suppliers, purchasing firms, distributors, and logistics companies share information about orders, production, inventory levels, and delivery of products and services so that they can source, produce, and deliver goods and services efficiently. SCM helps organizations achieve great efficiencies by automating parts of these processes or by helping organizations rethink and streamline these processes. SCM is important to a business because through its efficiency it can coordinate, schedule, and control the delivery of products and services to customers.
Business benefits include: (Table 2.5)
• Decide when and what to produce, store, and move
• Rapidly communicate orders
• Track the status of orders
• Check inventory availability and monitor inventory levels
• Reduce inventory, transportation, and warehousing costs
• Track shipments
• Plan production based on actual customer demand
• Rapidly communicate changes in product design
Define customer relationship management systems and describe how they benefit businesses.
Customer relationship management systems enable a business to better manage its relationships with existing and potential customers. With the growth of the Web, potential customers can easily comparison shop for retail and wholesale goods and even raw materials, so treating customers better has become very important.
Business benefits include:
• CRM systems provide information to coordinate all the business processes that deal with customers in sales, marketing, and service to optimize revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. This information helps firms identify, attract, and retain the most profitable customers; provide better service to existing customers; and increase sales.
• CRM systems consolidate customer data from multiple sources and provide analytical tools for answering questions such as: What is the value of a particular customer to the firm over his/her lifetime?
• CRM tools integrate a business’s customer-related processes and consolidate customer information from multiple communication channels, giving the customer a consolidated view of the company.
• Detailed and accurate knowledge of customers and their preferences helps firms increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and provide higher-quality customer service and support.
Describe the role of knowledge management systems in the enterprise.
Knowledge management systems enable organizations to better manage processes for capturing and applying knowledge and expertise. These systems collect all relevant knowledge and experience in the firm, and make it available wherever and whenever it is needed to improve business processes and management decisions. They also link the firm to external sources of knowledge.
• KMS support processes for acquiring, storing, distributing, and applying knowledge, as well as processes for creating new knowledge and integrating it into the organization.
• KMS include enterprise-wide systems for managing and distributing documents, graphics, and other digital knowledge objects; systems for creating corporate knowledge directories of employees with special areas of expertise; office systems for distributing knowledge and information; and knowledge work systems to facilitate knowledge creation.
• KMS use intelligent techniques that codify knowledge and experience for use by other members of the organization and tools for knowledge discovery that recognize patterns and important relationships in large pools of data.
List and describe the various types of collaboration and communication systems.
In an increasingly globalized economy, more jobs are becoming “interaction” jobs. These kinds of jobs require face-to-face interaction with other employees, managers, vendors, and customers. They require systems that allow the interaction workers to communicate, collaborate and share ides. Enterprise-wide information systems businesses can use to for interaction jobs include:
• Internet-based collaboration environments like Lotus Notes, Groove, and WebEx provide online storage space for documents, team communications (separated from email), calendars, and audio-visual tools members can use to meet face-to-face.
• Email and Instant Messaging (IM) are still reliable methods for communicating whenever and wherever around the globe.
• Cell phones and wireless handhelds give professionals and other employees an easy way to talk with one another, with customers and vendors, and with managers. These devices have grown exponentially in sheer numbers and in applications available.
• Social networking is no longer just “social.” Businesses are realizing the value of providing easy ways for interaction workers to share ideas and collaborate with each other.
• Wikis are ideal tools for storing and sharing company knowledge and insights. They are often easier to use and cheaper than more proprietary knowledge management systems. They also provide a more dynamic and current repository of knowledge than other systems.
Explain how intranets and extranets help firms integrate information and business processes.
Because intranets and extranets share the same technology and software platforms as the Internet, they are easy and inexpensive ways for companies to increase integration and expedite the flow of information within the company (intranets alone) and with customers and suppliers (extranets). They provide ways to distribute information and store corporate policies, programs, and data. Both types of nets can be customized by users and provide a single point of access to information from several different systems. Businesses can connect the nets to transaction processing systems easily and quickly. Interfaces between the nets and TPS, MIS, DSS, and ESS systems provide input and output for users.