Summary

Increasingly, corporations are recognizing the strategic role of the operations function. These organizations are discovering that a focus on customer needs is effective only if the operations function is designed and managed to meet those needs. From acquiring raw materials to fabricating parts, to assembling products, to customer delivery, a total systems perspective can enable us, in the ideal, to fashion an operations function like the inner workings of a finely tuned machine. Today that operation can be fine-tuned by using modern information systems. This text presents an enterprise-wide examination of implementing a modern information system in all business processes of a modern business enterprise. Enterprise Resource Planning software systems provide comprehensive management of financial, manufacturing, sales, distribution and human resources across the enterprise. The ability of ERP systems to support data drill down and to eliminate the need to reconcile across functions is designed to enable organizations to compete on the performances of the entire supply chain.