Enterprise_Systems

Enterprise systems are a software that provides the technology to integrate and coordinate information and data that can be shared between any business function throughout a company. It brings together all information from multiple information or data systems that the company may use. Some examples of what functions are supported by an enterprise system are the financial and accounting processes, The human resources processes, Manufacturing and production processes, and sales and marketing processes. Effectively implementing and using and enterprise system can contribute to achieving operational excellence by increasing operational efficiency, and by providing company wide information to help managers make better decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2011). It will help standardize the important business processes throughout the company, wherever in the world they may be located. An enterprise system will help a company to respond rapidly to customer requests for information or products, and because the system integrates the order, manufacturing, and delivery data, manufacturing is better informed about producing only what customers have ordered, procuring exactly the right amount of raw materials to fill actual orders, staging production, and minimizing the time that components or finished products are in inventory (Laudon & Laudon, 2011). Some of the challenges posed by implementing and enterprise system would be first that it is very expensive to purchase, and implement. It could take a large company several years to complete a large scale implementation of the enterprise system, or a system for supply chain management, or a customer relationship management system. The total costs of implementing such a large system including the software, database tools, consulting fees, personnel costs, training, and perhaps hardware costs, might amount to four or five times the initial purchase price of the software. Also, once you adopt and enterprise software application from a vendor, your firm becomes dependent upon the vendor to upgrade its product and maintain your installation, and it would be very costly to switch vendors or software once you already chose a vendor. (Laudon & Laudon, 2011). As for cloud computing, the infrastructure provider focuses on hardware, networking, power, cooling, and the operating environment that supports application manageability, reliability, and scalability; leaving the organization free to focus on their application's business functionality. This provides many benefits in terms of reduced capital outlay and operating costs; and increased capacity, scalability and availability (Microsoft library, http://msdn.microsoft.com). Depending on the type of cloud computing you use, there are different benefits and liabilities. The table I found below shows some benefits and some liabilities of cloud computing. If you use a separate data base than someone else a benefit is that it is easy to implement, and easy to move the application from on-premises to a hosted environment. Back up is easier, restore, and monitoring as most existing tools operate at a database level. A liability is that data is duplicated across databases because others may have the same common tables, and higher hardware costs. Shared databases have the benefits of lower memory consumption, more customers using the same database per server, common tables are shared. Liabilities of a shared database are less isolation, requires additional development effort to ensure high isolation, tenant's/user’s data is shared amongst other tenants/user’s, Back-up and restore is a challenge that requires a custom solution, and monitoring tenant/user activity is a challenge.