Strengthening links through real-time connections
Business process flexibility versus the cost of technology in the supply chain is an ongoing debate within many companies. Jane Thomson, MD of Softworx, an EOH company and distributor of Infor in Sub-Saharan Africa, says savvy manufacturers have recognised the effectiveness of an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in enabling effective response to change and, reducing long-term IT costs.
ERP aims to help the company and its business partners meet the challenges and opportunities in a global, multi-channel environment.
“To achieve real competitive advantage, businesses have to change the way they do business,” Thomson says. “That means changing business processes to gain visibility across the global supply chain. As a platform which provides this critical insight and enables effective response to change, an integrated ERP system takes you beyond simply managing internal business processes.” But, today, Thomson adds, what many companies need to realise is that in addition to an ERP system a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy is needed to achieve ultimate success.
Sourcing the best suppliers
An example is in the case of finding the best suppliers for your business. This requires a comprehensive database that enables a manufacturer to recognise where opportunities for lower costs exist as well as the ability to have real-time connections to suppliers for immediate response to changing production demands. New suppliers must then be brought on board quickly and cost effectively with the ability to share, and respond to, real-time demand and production data, all of which form part of an integrated ERP system.
System stumbling blocks
One of the main criticisms and current stumbling blocks of ERP, according to Thomson, is that there are many systems in an organisation that run independently of everything else in the company, and don't need to form part of the ERP system. She says the answer to this conundrum is SOA - which allows corporations to start weaving together people, applications and data to support individual and unique processes.
Finding harmony
SOA is now being used across industries to harmonise technologies and approaches they use to integrate and change processes and to exchange data between systems, devices and people by first linking pockets of information and then transforming them to become more efficient. SOA offers a means of “switching off” old components of an ERP application, and keeping them connected to the components they affect by means of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
But Thomson warns that when considering upgrading and ripping out and replacing a current ERP system, consider the vendor's SOA strategy first: “You should not only be able to ‘switch off' certain components in your ERP system and replace them with newer modules, but you will no longer be locked into a specific vendor's products as you were before.”
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