Functions of Production Factors
This involves various activities such as generating production plan and schedule, supervision and controlling of workforce, monitoring product quality, maintenance of production equipment and formulating of production methods to be used. PF is relating with the outputs which are physical from the process of production to inputs which are physical or simply which are denoted as production factors.
This involves manufacturing of new products, production processes and upgrade of the already existing products or processes. R&D it’s always coordinate closely with activities of the market within the company, hence ensuring that the company provides the customers’ needs in the most efficient way, very effective and much more in way that is economical.
These functions consist of acquiring of raw materials for production, manufacturing components and tools and equipment to be used for manufacturing process by the company.PF is mostly concerned with goods acquired and the services the organisation uses. Its responsibilities expands to goods and services buying for the organisation as a whole, Where in the buy making some factors has to be put in to consideration namely: Quantity which may attract discounts in price when goods are bought in large quantities, Quality, if the quality of the goods and services acquired is high then we expect the demand to be high hence more supply, Price the best price has to be indicated due to the customers need and satisfaction as well the cost of production and the organisations goals and objectives and lastly is the delivery is dealing with duration between ordering and delivering the good and services.
Here the company carries an analysis to identify their market, set price of their product and facilitates product promotion and advertisements. The aim of the market is to satisfy the customers wants and needs with the right price. Some of the fundamental marketing activities is how to manage the marketing mix which contains the 4ps namely: Product this basically how the right product can satisfy the customers wants, Price should be consistent with the perception of the customers, Promotion the product should be promoted in methods that will alert the customer, Place this making all goods and services reliable, available at all time especially during distribution
This is concerned with the management of employees working in the manufacturing company. That is, recruitment and selection where they that right individuals are selected to the right jobs and recruited. Training and development this is done to enable all workers employed perform the responsibilities assigned effectively. The others are relations of employees, Procedures for grievances and the matters considered in terms of discipline, health matters and as well as safety matters.
Centralized Data and Sharing of company’s data
This will improve work flow within the company by creating processes that are standardized across the company. Also ERP will efficiency by ensuring employees are able to access information any time they need it.
Automation of business processes.
This will reduce massive use of paper work thus enhancing efficiency and productivity by reducing transaction time and cost effectively. Also it’s good to note that no much effort will be needed interns of man power as much will be done by the systems. This will reduce the cost that used to be spent in catering for the man power or labour.
Improved Human Resource Management
An ERP will enable Human resource managers to be able to focus on the creation of a more innovative and productive workforce as a result of reduced paper work associated with employee’s management. This will also ease the work of allocating and budgeting the resources available in all fields as the resource planner put in place will cater for all that and in an easy that will require no much from many people.
Enhances team work
Sharing of information using an ERP system make use of human resource promotes team work which can lead to production of innovative solutions via shared knowledge and expertise across the company, thus improving productivity (Whitehouse, 2017).
This is as a result of virtual communication across company’s supply chain thus reducing response time between the two. This virtual communication is set in a way that anything or any discussion or clarification needed by any party can be handled easily as there is smooth interactions between the two.
SAP captures the following information representing static functionalities of a company
Company Codes – Used for identifying the proposed company codes if available for customers being evaluated.
Benefits – these are benefits of using company’s code.
Costs -This is the costs of usage of recommended company codes.
Issues –It identifies issues or problems arising in the company for usage of company code.
Master Data is a core data that is used to maintain transactions such as production, stock transfer, sales, purchasing and among others. This data serves as a reference point for other transaction processes (Reddy, 2013).
Master Data do not change they remain consistent and are always required the same way they are. For instance, a customer remains the same when checking in and checking out of the organisational website.
Marketing
Transaction data on the other hand changes every time a transaction activity occurs. For instance, when purchasing a product, the price of that product might change time to time.
Master data is measured by the number of inconsistencies while transaction data is measured by the amount of data that is decentralized and distributed by various departments in an organization.
The organisational levels are Client, plant and storage location. In the client level data is made valid for the whole company. For example, material group. Under plant level information such as purchase data is made valid within a single plant while in storage location data such as picking area is only valid for one storage location.
Screens are divided into:
Main work level that contains basic data for specific departments and additional data level that maintains extra or additional information such as description of materials, administrative information among others.
These master records are structured I this manner in order to promote easy reference and retrieval of the information as well as reducing information redundancy (Anon., 2014).
An example of customer master can be represented below.
Customer master record consist of the business transaction information and the system record and execute these transactions while material master data record is a description of an item that is in the stock, purchased, sold, produced among others. A material master always has a serial number in order to differentiate different descriptions on an item (Michaels, 2010).
Material Master Data Record is complex because each process uses different materials differently. That is each process, may need a master data that is not needed by another process. For example, the purchase process requires information regarding who orders the material and the cost of the order. On the other hand, processing of this order requires shipping and availability data.
ICT advancement has affected the competition in markets. Business intelligence being a very crucial core competence of ERP has acted as a facilitator with the advanced technology in collecting, integrating and analysing the data within a firm hence helping in process of making decisions.
(Stackowiak R., 2007)define Business intelligence to be the method of taking huge data quantity, you analyze it and presents set reports of high-level that summarize the principle of that info into the basis of commerce actions, enabling the top managers in making essential day-to-day commercial decisions. ((Cui et al Z., 2007) view Business Intelligence as mean and techniques of developing business enactment by providing a lot of assists for the management who are termed as decision makers enabling them to have information at hand that is actable upon.
Human Resource Management
Business intelligence may have a lot of importance if utilized by a company. Through BI we can eliminate all guesswork in the company, facilitating a lot of coordination in departments, enabling quick responses and change in conditions such as conditions in finance, preferences of the customers in details.BI also improves the company’s performance in overall. The following are some of the major benefits of business intelligence as a business tool.
It easy now for employees in conversion of knowledge about the business to solve problems of the business via analytical intelligence hence increasing the rates of response especially in mail directly sent, phones, electronic mails etc. Secondly is that BI helps in analysing the clunk stream data hence improving electronic commerce.
Another importance of BI is that helps in curbing criminal activities that are with relation laundering of money. Fourth is that it helps in determining the need of the customer that what the type of product or service the customer requires ((Hawking, 2013). Another major importance of BI as a business tool is analysing the medical trials drugs experimentations.BI helps in reducing the equipment stoppage where we apply prognostic upkeep.BI provides a graphic user interface that is friendly in displaying the knowledge
A database is collection of organized and planned which is normally related set of records stored in a computer while a data warehouse is type of database that is special and used in analysing of data.
Db uses OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) which is used for recording the user data for reference or history while a data warehouse uses (OLAP)Online Analytical Processing which reads the data in history in business decisions by the user. Normalization especially in case of RDMS is part of DB as tables and joins might be complex, hence normalization is done to reduce the redundant of data and save on the space meant for storage while in data warehouse the tables and joins are simpler because they appear to be de-normalized, hence it is done by reducing time meant for response in analytical queries. In database ERD are used for database design while in data warehouse modelling techniques are used for designing.
Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a technology used in computers where systems focus on how to analyse data in a given database. It is characterized by its capability analytically, multi-dimensional address in processing of all the gathered data.
Online Transaction Processing is a type of information system that gives priority to transactions that deal with operations of data. It is applied mostly in business such as databases, banks and even application in hospital. In OLAP which appears to be in data warehouse the tables and joins are simpler because they appear to be de-normalized, hence it is done by reducing time meant for response in analytical queries While in OLTP Normalization especially in case of RDMS is part of DB as tables and joins might be complex, hence normalization is done to reduce the redundant of data and save on the space meant for storage while in data warehouse
ERP Systems
Business intelligence is capable of supporting decisions, OLAP, analysis of statistics, forecasting and mining of data. There are some techniques for Business intelligence and that can facilitate collection, organization and presented as reports. They are listed and explained as below.
Predictive modelling which is technique that predicts the value for certain specific attribute of data item. Characterization and data mining description is also a technique that elaborates on data distribution, how it is dispersed and its exception. Another technique is Classification that determines and identifies where a certain class of an item of data belongs. The other techniques is online analytical processing(OLAP) which provides time response series and the trend of how vies are analysed. Model visualization is another technique where the understood knowledge is expressed in use graphs, charts, SmartArt, histograms and other visual means
SAP commercial stuffs is a matching set of front-end apps that allow users in the business to view, sorting, and analysing BI data. At SAP they offer everything the customer needs especially for all business intelligences stacks. The advances memory chip which are referred to as SAP proved real time business intelligence operations and SAP.
SAP makes it possible to have a single point of access to the information as a tool of BI ,hence making access of collected data at a single point by the employees. Data collected is presented in form of reports hence making it easy for employees to analyse the data at a high level.
SAP as a BI tool make it easy in use of graphical user interface and there possessing a better format. Some of the reasons to as why SAP as a BI tool is better than others its ability in analysing data that are multidimensional in web and MS office environs. SAP have a very good query performance hence reducing work for the employees, hence minimal administration work is needed. Employees usually integrate well with other platforms
References
(Cui et al Z., D. E. a. L. M., 2007. Benefits of Ontologies in Real Time Data. Access’, Digital Ecosystems and Technologies Conference,, Volume DEST ’07., pp. pp. 392-397..
(Hawking, 2013. Factors Critical To The Success of Business Intelligence Systems, College Of Business. [Online] Available at: https://vuir.vu.edu.au/2431. [Accessed 19th aug 2017].
Anon., 2014. Guru99. [Online] Available at: https://www.guru99.com/material-master-views-ultimate-guide-2.html [Accessed 19 August 2017].
Michaels, D., 2010. Groups. [Online] Available at: https://sap.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/sap-log-mm/equipment-master-vs-material-master-3217949 [Accessed 19 August 2017].
Reddy, A. K., 2013. What is the difference between Master data and Transaction data in SAP?. SAP Interview Questions , Volume 2, pp. 1-3.
Stackowiak R., R. J. a. G. R., 2007. Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions.
Whitehouse, S., 2017. “Improving operations and productivity with ERP software”, s.l.: Winman Advanced ERP systems.
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