Kerem's Bio & Lessons Learned for 16th June

Kerem Ziraman is a second year MBA student in Bilkent University. His MBA education is mostly concentrated on marketing. He completed his BS in Bilkent University's Industrial Engineering Department. As a senior, he participated in a project for Coca Cola Turkey which automated the order generation process between warehouse and distributors. The project was a stand alone program, which was not integrated to the ERP software of the company. He also witnessed the use of old MAN-MAN, and (partially) implementation process of a small company ERP during his internships in ASELSAN (2003) and ORS Bearings (2005) respectively.

Outcome of 16.06.2008
ERP links software, operations and business units. An ERP is modular sturucture, these share same database.
As a quick history, ERP's origins descends from BOMs, at least in manufacturing terms.
One of the major discussions on 16th was on open source ERP. This discussion can be summarized as, open source has a good code, since many eyes checked the integrity of code, but there is lack of support and security with respect to not open source programns.
Another discussion was focused on the providers of ERP software, major players, smaller ones & open source communities. A fourth type On-Demand ERP also exists. It depends on the size of the company, the degree of internationalization, the budget of the company, country conditions... etc to pick from the list above.
On demand ERP is a structurally different from the other ERP programs. The provider of the S/W is also provider of the ERP service, where the server and applications are all kept in a distant place. Company sends all the vital information to outside server, however it critically decreases the infrastructure costs.
Some ERP related technical words were also mentioned. Transactions as in terms of creating, changing and displaying data. Transaction code, 4 Digit Transaction Codes, and Modules.
"When ERP was seen as an IT implementation it tends to fail."
Many companies applied the ERP implemantions because of the Y2K Problem.
There were 4 reasons some projects failed. Project didnt meet requirements, budget, time and misuse.
Implementation Team: Champion*, people who know workflow, top management, IT manager, consultants. * is important to keep the ERP project alive, s/he is the person on the hook.
Data warehousing and data mining was also mentioned. WArehousing was used to reveal the trends when you know what you are looking for. Mining on the other hands tries to explain relation ships between variables with models.