What is ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a software that is built to organizations belonging to different industrial sectors, regardless of their size and strength.
The ERP is intended to help and coordinate pretty much every practical space of a business interaction like acquisition of labor and products, deal and conveyance, finance, bookkeeping, human asset, fabricating, creation arranging, coordinations and distribution center administration.
Business Process Integration
Every business, regardless of the industry they belong to, require connected systems with efficient information flow from one business process to another. Business Process Integration (BPI) plays an important role in overcoming integrating challenges that allows organizations to connect systems internally and externally.
Business Process Integration (BPI) allows −
automation of business processes,
integration of systems and services,
secure sharing of data across numerous applications, and
automation of management, operational, and supporting process.
The following illustration shows an overview of various business processes running in an enterprise and how they are integrated.
Advantages of ERP
By integrating the business processes, the ERP offers the following advantages −
· Saves time and expenses.
· Allows faster decision-making by the management, utilizing the data and reporting tools designed in the systems.
· Single data source and sharing of data among all the units of an organization.
· Helps in tracking every transaction that takes place in an organization, from starting till end.
· Supplies real-time information whenever required.
· Provides synchronized information transfer in between different functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, human resource, logistics, etc.
Disadvantages of ERP
It is not always easy to incorporate ERP in an organization. ERP suffers from the following drawbacks −
· Sometimes business processes critical to an organization are to be re-engineered to align them with an ERP solution.
· Cost of complex integration can be very high.
· Switching from one ERP solution to another increases the implementation cost even further.
· End-users are to be trained for their daily operations.
· Customization is not preferred.
