...award. If it did happen, tiny Nakisa would take its place, in a very small and select circle, alongside such companies as Adobe, Cisco, and Microsoft. Five years ago, SAP would likely have built the application with its own engineering organization. Yusuf’s team had worked with SAP’s product management organization to put together a deck of slides on the Nakisa partnership to be presented to the SAP Board. Yusuf flipped through the deck and wondered if the recommendation to elevate Nakisa to Tier 1 status really made sense. Yusuf reflected for a moment on how far things had come in just a few years, to even be considering this. Prior to 2000, organizations in the enterprise resource planning software (ERP) industry—notably archrivals SAP and Oracle—played clear-cut roles in the complex process of developing and installing enterprise applications, even as the nature of the product demanded extensive collaboration between software supplier, enterprise customer, and the system integrators that drove implementation. SAP’s technology and its ability to create new areas of business process expertise for new applications were instrumental in making the firm the world’s leader in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) field (see Exhibit 1). In the new century, with the...
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...reviewing ERP vendors, Summit selected ERP software from SAP because of its functionality in sales and distribution, materials management and financials, and its knowledge of the distribution business. Summit visited other electrical distributers using SAP, including some of its competitors, to make sure the software would work in its line of business. Summit was able to go live with its new ERP system across 19 locations in January 2007. Nevertheless, Summit still had to customise its SAP software to meet its unique business requirements. Most SAP delivery and material scheduling functions were designed for overnight processing, because many industries have longer lead times for order fulfilment. Waiting for overnight inventory updates would significantly delay Summit’s sales. Summit found it could solve this problem by running smaller, more frequent updates for just the material received during the day, rather than running big inventory updates less often. This provided more timely and accurate snapshots of what was actually available in inventory so that orders could be rapidly processed. Wire and cable are one of Summit’s most popular product categories. Summit buys these products by the reel in lengths up to 5,000 feet and then cuts them into various lengths to sell to customers. This makes it difficult to determine how much of this type of inventory has been sold and when it is time to replenish. To address this issue, Summit used a “batch management” solution in SAP’s ERP materials...
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...for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing. In this highly advanced technological era, it is almost unimaginable for companies not to implement systems such as SAP’s so as to boost their Information Systems. Since the global community has 'gotten much smaller', than say fifty years ago, it is imperative that companies design their Information Systems with integrated features so as to operate effectively between countries. The implementation of SAP technology is no longer an advantage but a competitive parity and its relevance toward the field of Management Information Systems is paramount. "Get in the game or fall off the wayside." The story and development of this giant of a company is remarkable. SAP grew from a very modest five member staff at the founding of the company in 1972 to approximately 53,000 employees 38 years later (sap.com ). That is like hiring an average of 1432 employees per year for the last 37 years; a significant contribution by many standards. The company's success and relevance to the world of Information Systems can be attributed to its founders, management, and employees realizing SAP's mission through a vision. It is hard to argue that the company had not done remarkably well, when in 2010 "more than 50,000 customers and other interested people attended SAP's SAPPHIRE Now event either live or online" (sap.com ). Curran and Ladd confirmed the company's success by noting, "SAP is the number one vendor of standard business application software...
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...Established in 1972, NDC was the first venture among the ADNOC Group of Companies. Today, the company operates a huge fleet (over 60 nos.) of land, offshore drilling rigs, island rigs, Multi-Purpose Service Vessel, as well as water well rigs. Since Rig ND-1 began work in 1973, NDC has drilled over 6,000 wells land, offshore and island. Although NDC has celebrated its 40 years in 2012, IT and its involvement in NDC throughout that have only been felt and appreciated in the last 10 to 15 years. Many IT related projects, step-change initiatives, and high profile implementations occurred during the said period and I’m going to mention four main ones, namely: SAP ERP implementation, VSAT connectivity of the remote sites, corporate intranet portal and video conferencing. SAP ERP implementation Prior to the introduction of an ERP platform into the organization, most of the legacy applications that NDC was using were built in-house, not scalable, and lacked proper and adequate integration. Moreover, the hardware and software to support those applications were old, perform as silos, and found to be expensive and difficult to maintain. With that in mind, the goals and objectives for the project were listed as follows: * Replace an ageing...
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...document” in deference to the legendary Chinese general. It outlined the strategic opportunities and challenges that SAP should expect to face between 2006 and 2010, and examined the prevailing forces shaping the enterprise software industry in 2006: technological change, consolidation, and shifting customer needs. Kagermann believed that emerging Internet-based technologies and standards known collectively as “Web services” soon would transform the $79.8 billion enterprise software applications industry, in which SAP held the leading market position.1 Although sales of SAP’s existing products had begun to rebound in 2004 after a multi-year slowdown, Kagermann had committed SAP to deploy new Web services-based technology on a massive scale by the end of 2007. (See Exhibit 1 for an overview of SAP’s financial performance.) He also had announced several growth initiatives that hinged on the implementation of SAP’s recently defined Web services strategy, which was based on a framework SAP called the Enterprise Services Architecture 1 “Worldwide Enterprise Applications 2006-2010 Forecast,” IDC, #201791, May 2006. Figure denotes 2006 estimated worldwide...
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...LEGO - EMBRACING CHANGE BY COMBINING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH A FLEXIBLE INFORMATION SYSTEM History of LEGO Company The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The company has passed from father to son and is now owned by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a grandchild of the founder. It has come a long way over the past almost 80 years - from a small carpenter’s workshop to a modern, to a global enterprise that is now, in terms of sales, the world’s fourth-largest manufacturer of toys. The name 'LEGO' is an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". The original Lego toys started with a wooden duck. But the first LEGO automatic binding brick is their most important product. The products have undergone extensive development over the years – but the foundation remains the traditional LEGO brick. The Lego Group began in the carpentry workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, in Billund, Denmark in 1916. In 1961, Lego wished to expand sales to North America, but did not have the logistical capabilities to do so. Lego made an arrangement allowing Samsonite to begin producing and selling Lego products in the United States and Canada. On 7 June 1968, the first Legoland Park was opened in Billund. This theme park featured elaborate models of miniature towns built entirely from Lego bricks. The three acre (12,000 m²) park attracted 625,000 visitors in its first year alone. During the next 20 years, the park grew to more than eight times...
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...may differ by scenario scope and components, or the release levels on which the versions are based. The solid foundation for SAP Best Practices Baseline is the SAP ERP 6.0 application. Industry-generic SAP Best Practices for procurement, manufacturing, sales, financials and analytics processes include: annual operating plan, sales & operations planning, MRP, procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, make-to-stock production, financial management, and accounting. SAP Learning Hub provides immediate, cloud-based access to a vast selection of SAP learning content – and to our innovative, interactive learning rooms. And when you add SAP Live Access, you can carry out class assignments, prepare for customer engagements, or just experiment with live, fully configured SAP training systems. 1. Product Release Strategy. SAP has traditionally released products and made major changes to underlying functionality on a five-year schedule, Shepherd notes. So twice a decade, SAP's customer base faced a tough decision. 2. Growth Strategy. In the AMR report, Shepherd writes that SAP has a business strategy that is fundamentally focused on organic revenue growth and that SAP has always been confident about its organization's ability to develop new products and improve existing ones. 3. Platform Strategy. Shepherd traces the roots of SAP's platform strategy back to...
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...This paper will attempt to look at SAP’s Business Suite software covering areas of SCM, ERP, and SCM software catered to medium to large size businesses. In turn, this paper will also examine the profile of the major vendors dominating each respective industry. SAP started in 1972, and is now the market and technology leader in the client/server enterprise resource planning software (2). SAP Business Suite is a bundle of business applications that provide integration of information and processes, collaboration, industry-specific functionality, and scalability (3). What is Supply Chain Management (SCM) software? According to Wikipedia: SCM software is used in executing supply chain transactions, managing supplier relationships and controlling associated business processes. One of the most challenging questions for a company to ask itself is how much to product a product for a given set of demand. A component SCM software suite should have a forecasting feature which will attempt to gauge the balance of supply and demand and compute future production needs. Common areas of SCM software would cover the following business areas: customer requirement processing, purchase order processing, inventory management, goods receipt and warehouse management, supplier management/sourcing (1). Another way of defining SCM is the combination of art and science in improving the ways a company converts raw ingredients into a finished product or service and deliver it to customers. There...
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...Resources Planning (ERP). Perhaps we can still survive without technology, but without ERP, a company may fail to remain competitive as they fail to respond quickly to new practices and procedures. Indeed, a company who quest for competitive advantage in this era of intense competition where business entities compete for innovation, expanding customer’s expectation and internationalization of markets, a company regardless of their size must have a reliable ERP to support them. ERP has proven to be an effective tool for competitive advantage as ERP help to delivery products of the highest quality on time, as quickly as possible and at the best price. Davenport (1998, p.121) suggests that “ERP appear to be a dream comes true as these software promise the seamless integration of the information flowing through a company. Markus et al. (2000) defines ERP as commercial software package that enable the integration of transaction oriented data and business process throughout an organization. The purpose of this paper is to discuss facts about ERP, its benefits and the critical success factors in ERP implementation especially for small manufacturing companies, which is in this paper, will sometime refer to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The remainder of this paper is organises as follows. In Section 2, facts about ERP software is presents. The ERP and its relations to small manufacturing company are discusses in Section 3. Section 4 outlines the benefits of ERP, mainly for SMEs...
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...communicate effectively (if at all). (Rainer & Turban, 2011). Consequently, the individual information systems are acting as silos, containing information that cannot be shared from one information system to another. Eventually, businesses need to fill the communication gaps that exist. Linking these separate information systems creates a challenge for the business. There are a few well known software suppliers that provide flexible business suites that are able to integrate the disjointed information systems under one complete system solution. Oracle and SAP are the most popular suppliers of such systems. Within the business suite these systems are known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. Enterprise Resource Planning offered by SAP serves to solve the information systems communication gaps between the various business functions such as; Human Resources, Finance and Operations. The Human Resources processes can benefit from SAP’s ERP by deploying the right people with the right skills at the right time. This Human...
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...FedEx and SAP Team Up to Provide Integrated Logistics Solution Federal Express and SAP are working together to provide software that integrates FedEx’s shipment tracking capability and logistics with SAP’s R/3 ERP software. A module of the software runs on R/3 and automatically generates FedEx shipping documents and tracking numbers for products ordered using SAP’s R/3 software. When the products are delivered by FedEx, transactions are sent from FedEx to update data in R/3. The goal is to make R/3 work like a standard business process and automatically trigger other processes, such as proof of delivery and payment. The applications are designed to give the 13,000 enterprises deployed on SAP R/3 real-time package life-cycle information. The SAP/FedEx applications, dubbed The Product, dovetail with SAP’s development of a suite of supply-chain products. “We think this is a turning point in the industry,” said Paul Wahl, chief executive officer of SAP AG. Wahl says that applications for spotting bottlenecks, reacting to customer orders, and linking transportation with production schedules are among the five top priorities for SAP. Others include electronic commerce buying tools and systems for meshing Internet transactions with financial systems. “Most of our customers are in the process of integrating an enterprise system,” says Laurie Tucker, senior vice president of logistics, electronic commerce, and catalog, a $500 million FedEx unit. “They are looking for ways...
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...The Goal of this summary is to provide Riordan Manufacturing the ability to facilitate business needs for the four divisions within Riordan Manufacturing; Finance and Accounting, Internet Site, Sales and Marketing, Human Resources and Legal, and Operations. Finance and Accounting Presently, all four locations use finance and accounting systems to collect, analyze and generate financial data for the company’s sales and revenue reports. This requires the company to manually generate reports, re-enter data and convert this data to compatible formats for the corporate headquarters to process. Each manufacturing entity uses similar subsystems such as procurement, order entry, invoice and shipping. The invoice subsystem will need to interface with the accounts receivable component. These systems feed into the sales and purchasing history, accounts receivable and accounts payable. The procurement, accounts payable and accounts receivable then are provided to the general ledger. Payroll is a separate subsystem that connects to the general ledger. Procurement is the obtaining of the necessary raw materials and supplies and this system needs to keep track of what is on order and in house. The order entry system records all of the customer’s orders. Order entry then provides data to the invoice system for correct billing. Accounts payable keeps tabs on making payments obtained via the procurement system while accounts receivable records customer payments on their invoices. The general...
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...The Technology Choices Written By: Predrag Jakovljevic Published On: August 27 2005 Microsoft's Uncontested UI Supremacy In the battle between Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) and the UK-based the Sage Group plc (LSE: SGE.L) for the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market segment, technology choices will be a major factor. The previous parts of this note detailed the strategies of these two major vendors and analyzed how the market would respond. But, going a mile further, there are some important areas where the synergy and a bridge between MBS and the rest of the "classic" Microsoft world could take place, such as the previously mentioned "user experience" mantra. The basic hypothesis is that Office (i.e., Word, Excel, and Outlook) constitute the core of the user experiences of many millions of existing and prospective desktop customers. Leveraging that ubiquitous look-and-feel acquaintance in the MBS product lines (and in those of rapidly increasing independent software vendors [ISV]) is something that can add tremendous clout to MBS sales efforts—with the supposedly minimal training for the information technology (IT)-resource constrained SME market. In fact, the ongoing Outlook, Excel, or Word user interface (UI) metaphor moves may speak volumes about where the entire market is going. Possibly the most vocal in that regard could be the recent announcement made by Microsoft and SAP that they are jointly developing a product that will integrate back-end SAP...
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...1. 1. G S T 5 0 8 3 INFORMATION SYSTEMS & ELECTRONIC COMMERCE Group Members 2. 2. • Summit Electric Supply Co., Inc. engages in the wholesale distribution of electrical equipment, supplies, and solutions for the electrical professionals in the United States and internationally. • This company is one of the top wholesale distributors. Summit obtains finished goods from manufacturers and sells them to electrical contractors working on projects ranging from small construction job to sophisticated industrial projects. • This company was known as middle on the supply chain, so it must be able to handle high volume of transactions and swift inventory turnover. • However, the information built in the 1980s could not keep up with the business growth, it could only handle a fixed number of locations and limited the range of numbers that could be used on document. Introduction 3. 3. Question 1 : Which business processes are the most important at Summit Electric Supply ? • The company is known as a one of the top distributors, Supply chain management played the most important business process at Summit Electric. Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of the flow of goods. • It includes the movement and storage of raw materials work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption. 4. 4. Why ? • The reason business processes are the most important is both manufacturers and end users rely on distributors to efficiently bring products...
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...An Organisational Analysis of SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd SECTION-D, GROUP-IV Archit Prasad (12 DM-037) Debaleena Biswas (12HR-007) Himanshu Garg (12 FN-054) Madhavi Verma (12 DM-081) Tapapriyo Maitra (12 DM-151) Yogaesh Sharda (12 FN-159) Yogesh Khanna (12 IB- 061) Introduction India has always been chosen as the preferred Research and Development centre by many multinational organisations; SAP Labs was no exception. SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd is SAP AG's largest R& D center in the world. The functional areas of SAP Labs India are Research & Breakthrough Innovation, Product Development, Customer solutions and Operations, etc. Due to its excellent employee learning system, effective management control and state-of-the art infrastructure, SAP Labs India is rated among Top 5 Best workplaces in IT software industry. The next few Pages aims at analysing the Oragnisational structure, culture, life/cycle stage , size , business environment and finally the right “fit” of SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd. About SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd SAP Labs is the research and development organization of the parent company. SAP has its development organization spread across the globe. SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd was opened in the year 1998. Other labs are located in Germany, France, Bulgaria and Hungary in Europe; Palo Alto, USA; Bangalore and Gurgaon, India; São Leopoldo, Brazil; Ra'anana and Karmiel, Israel; Montreal and Vancouver, Canada and Shanghai, China. SAP Labs India is the largest...
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