What is ERP?
Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs.
That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.
That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly.
Take a customer order, for example. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different departments’ computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse’s computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. “You’ll have to call the warehouse” is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers.
ERP vanquishes the old standalone computer systems in finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse, and replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly approximate the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors’ ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of the functions for another day.
How can ERP improve a company’s business performance?
ERP’s best hope for demonstrating value is as a sort of battering ram for improving the way your company takes a customer order and processes it into an invoice and revenue—otherwise known as the order fulfillment process. That is why ERP is often referred to as back-office software. It doesn’t handle the up-front selling process (although most ERP vendors have developed CRM software or acquired pure-play CRM providers that can do this); rather, ERP takes a customer order and provides a software road map for automating the different steps along the path to fulfilling it. When a customer service representative enters a customer order into an ERP system, he has all the information necessary to complete the order (the customer’s credit rating and order history from the finance module, the company’s inventory levels from the warehouse module and the shipping dock’s trucking schedule from the logistics module, for example).
People in these different departments all see the same information and can update it. When one department finishes with the order it is automatically routed via the ERP system to the next department. To find out where the order is at any point, you need only log in to the ERP system and track it down. With luck, the order process moves like a bolt of lightning through the organization, and customers get their orders faster and with fewer errors than before. ERP can apply that same magic to the other major business processes, such as employee benefits or financial reporting.
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- Berdasarkan article di atas jelaskan dalam suatu ringkasan apa yang dimaksud oleh Thomas Wailgum?
Yang dimaksud Thomas Wailgum adalah sebuah perusahaan dianjurkan untuk menggunakan sistem ERP karena manfaat dari menggunakan ERP pada perusahaan sangat banyak. Dimana dengan menggunakan ERP, dapat mengintegrasi semua departemen dan fungsi suatu perusahaan yang terpusatkan ke dalam sebuah sistem computer. Sehingga dapat menggabungkan semua departemen yang ada diperusahaan tersebut kedalam suatu program. Dan dengan sebuah software yang terinterasi yang berjalan disebuah database tunggal maka proses setiap departemen akan menjadi lebih mudah dalam mendapatkan inormasi dan dapat berkomunikasi satu dengan lainnya. Dengan menggunakan ERP, proses bisnis yang terjadi disetiap departemen akan lebih terkontrol dan lebih cepat dalam proses pencarian informasi.
2. Dengan bahasa Anda sendiri jelaskan apa yang Anda pahami mengenai konsep ERP?
ERP merupakan suatu cara untuk mengelola sumber daya perusahaan dengan menggunakan teknologi informasi, Program ERP juga sangat membantu perusahaan yang memiliki bisnis proses yang luas, dengan menggunakan database dan reporting tools manajemen yang terbagi. Software ERP sangat mendukung pengoperasian yang efisien dari business processes dengan cara mengintegrasikan aktivitas-aktivitas dari keseluruhan bisnis termasuk sales, marketing, manufacturing, logistic, accounting, dan staffing.
3. Mengapa ERP penting untuk diterapkan di dalam perusahaan ?
Banyak keuntungan jika menerapkan sistem ERP di dalam perusahaan. Karena tujuan sistem ERP itu sendiri adalah untuk mengkoordinasikan bisnis organisasi secara keseluruhan. Dan manfaat dari penggunaan ERP bagi perusahaan diantaranya adalah : Otomatisasi dan integrasi proses bisnis, Membagi database yang umum dan praktek bisnis melalui enterprise, Menghasilkan informasi yang real-time dan memungkinkan perpaduan proses transaksi dan kegiatan perencanaan. Selain itu faktor penting lainnya adalah akurasi data yang masuk ke dalam sistem. Namun penekanan utamanya adalah pembenahan human resources perusahaan. Bukan hanya training yang dibutuhkan, tetapi pendidikan yang berkesinambungan .