What I have learned (16.06.2008)

ERP is generally a software which combines each business unit in a company. That is it helps to serve right info to right people for the right time. It is a complete suite of integrated Applications which can be generally named as finance, accounting, selling, human resources... This software has some unique identifying attributes, which are It has a single integrated Database. That database serves to help entering an information only once, and view it at any time it is needed. The entered informations can be reached in a real time fasion. That means there is no batch processing, or nightly updates for the data to make it available. The main functionality of the software has a modular structure. That is we can add or remove some modules to the main application. And all of the developed or new modules has similar user interface, which gives a greate familarity to the users.


We learned about some previous systems called MRP, MRP2, and ERP, one of our friends mentioned something like ERP2, and our instructor will search for it.

Another interesting discussion was about Why a firm need to implement an ERP system, here the main point is to evaluate bottlenecks first, and give enough education for the users and then adapt ERP system for the company. The chaos when implementing the ERP is enough so, reengineering the business processes at the same time implementing an ERP will not be a good practice. ERP systems has some best practices, but they will not fit to any living company. There must be some huge amount of configuration and customization and this will take a lot of time. Generally , some who will decide to implement an ERP system must have resonable causes. Copying another companies behavior , or implementing an ERP because of a problem like 2000 problem is not feasible.

There are major players at ERP system vendors which are Oracle and SAP generally. There are some small ERP companies, and there are Open Source ERP systems. Compiere, OFBiz, WebERP can be listed for open source vendors.

We have discussed cons and pros for these Open source ,major and small players.
Generally to say , if someone wants strong support and do not want to have a software development team major or small vendors can be a choice. If some can solve the problems by his/her team ,they can buy open source software. Open source software can be more configurable, can deliver fast support and can have small managable code size.

SAP system is a transactional system and all of the transactions has 4 character transaction codes. These transactions can be from any module. and a list of transaction makes a business process.

When implementing a new SAP system, first a war team must be formed. This team can be involved from Department managers who know business processes, consultants from SAP implementor firm, IT managers and a Champion who will be responsible for all of the project.

We learned that SAP has an open system architecture. That is it can work at many hardwares on very operating systems and with many different Relational Database vendors. SAP system van be internationalized, that is we can use screens in our language, with our currencies and tax rates. There is an audit trail system which can help us to resolve which transaction is made by which user.

There is also data mining solitions for SAP systems.

At last we see an example of business process which involves different modules and different transactions.