Cross Functional Enterprise Applications

Cross Functional Enterprise Applications

Many companies today are using information technology to develop integrated Cross-functional enterprise systems (refer Figure) that cross the boundaries of traditional business functions in order to reengineer and improve vital business processes all cross the enterprise. These organizations view cross- functional enterprise systems as a strategic way to use IT to share information resource and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes, and develop strategic relationships with customers, suppliers, and business partners.

Enterprise Application Architecture

Figure presents an enterprise application architecture, which illustrates the inter-relationships of the major cross-functional enterprise applications that many companies have or are installing today. This architecture does not provide a detailed or exhaustive application blueprint, but provides a conceptual framework to help you visualize the basic components, processes, and interfaces of these major e-business applications, and their interrelationships to each other.

This application architecture also spotlights the roles these business systems play in supporting the customers, suppliers, partners, and employees.

Notice that instead of concentrating on traditional business functions, or only supporting the internal business processes of a company, enterprise applications are focused on accomplishing fundamental business processes in concert with a company’s customer, supplier, partner, and employee stakeholders.

Thus, enterprise resource planning (ERP) concentrates on the efficiency of a firm’s internal production, distribution, and financial processes. Customer relationship Management (CRM) focuses on acquiring and retaining profitable customers via marketing, sales, and service processes. Partner relationship management (PRM) aims at acquiring and retaining partners who can enhance the selling and distribution of a firm’s products and services. Supply chain management (SCM) focuses on developing the most efficient and effective sourcing and procurement processes with suppliers for the products and services needed by a business. Knowledge management (KM) applications focus on providing a firm’s employees with tools that support group collaboration and decision support.

To provide a fast and effective ordering and delivery process to their customers, companies like IBM and Apple have turned their expertise and the technology inward. The result is an example of an enterprise system. An enterprise e- business system requires end-to-end connectivity across all of the different processes, from the company’s legacy systems to the outer reaches of its suppliers, customers, and partners.

In the personal computing world, customers want a system configured exactly the way they want it, and they want it as fast as possible. To accommodate these market pressures, PC manufacturers are developing and implementing configure-to-order enterprise systems.

Consider the real-time, configure-to-order system that IBM has created for its personal systems division. A customer in Europe can configure a personal computer on IBM’s website and get real-time availability and order confirmation. While this seems simple enough, to make this action possible it took a team of analysts and programmers and hundreds of man-years of effort to develop the myriad business processes and systems that need to work together.

Here’s what happens when a European customer places an order with IBM The other travels to IBM fulfillment engine located in the United Kingdom; its e- commerce engine located in Colorado, USA; its ERP and production management systems located in North Carolina, USA; its sales reporting system located in Connecticut, USA; its product database located in New York; and back to the customer’s browser in Europe. Every system updates its status and communicates with every other system in real time. And each order placed in Europe zips across the Atlantic an average of four times. In its journey, it touches dozens of geographical units, legacy systems, and databases strewn across the globe.

Enterprise Collaboration Systems

Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) are cross-functional information systems that enhance communication, coordination, and collaboration among the members of business teams and workgroups. Information Technology, especially Internet technologies, provides tools to help us collaborate—to communicate ideas, share resources, and coordinate our competitive work efforts as members of the many formal and informal process and project teams and workgroups that make up many of today’s organizations. Thus, the goal of enterprise collaboration systems is to enable us to work together more easily and effectively by helping us to

Communicate sharing information with each other.

Coordinate Coordinating our individual work efforts and use of resources with each other.

Collaborate Working together cooperatively on joint projects and assignments.

For example, engineers, business specialists, and external consultants may form a virtual team for a project. The team may rely on intranets and extranets to collaborate via e-mail, videoconferencing, discussion forums, and a multimedia database of work-in-progress information at a project website. The enterprise collaboration system may use PC workstations networked to a variety of servers on which project, cooperate, and other databases are stored. In addition, network servers may provide a variety of software resources, such as Web browsers, groupware, and application packages, to assist the team’s collaboration until the project is completed.