A_1-3 why ERP is required, it is important and should be done at this time?
   
  Help reduce operating costs
 
1
ERP software attempts to integrate business processes across departments onto a single enterprise-wide information system
   
2
The major benefits of ERP are improved coordination across functional departments and increased efficiencies of doing business
   
3
The immediate benefit from implementing ERP systems we can expect is reduced operating costs, such as lower inventory control cost, lower production costs, lower marketing costs and lower help desk support costs.
   
 
Facilitate Day-to-Day Management
 
1
ERP systems offer better accessibility to data so that management can have up-to-the-minute access to information for decision-making and managerial control
   
2
 ERP software helps track actual costs of activities and perform activity based costing
 
  Support Strategic Planning
 
1
Strategic Planning is "a deliberate set of steps that assess needs and resources; define a target audience and a set of goals and objectives; plan and design coordinated strategies with evidence of success; logically connect these strategies to needs, assets, and desired outcomes; and measure and evaluate the process and outcomes."
   
2
 Part of ERP software systems is designed to support resource-planning portion of strategic planning.
   
  The Competitive Business Environment and the Emerging Digital Firm
 
1
Four powerful worldwide changes have altered the business environment.
   
  Emergence of the Global Economy
 
1
Today, information systems provide the communication and analytical power that firms need for conducting trade and managing business on a global scale. Globalization and information technology also bring new threats to domestic business firms.
   
  Transformation of Industrial Economies
 
1
In a knowledge and information, based economy; knowledge and information are key ingredients in creating wealth. Knowledge and information are becoming the foundation for many new services and products.
   
  Transformation of the Business Enterprise
 
1
The traditional business firm was and still is a hierarchical, centralized, structured arrangement of specialist that typically relied on a fixed set of standard operating procedures to deliver a mass-produced product.
   
  The Emerging Digital Firm
 
1
The intensive use of information technology in business firms since the mid 1990s, coupled with equally significant organizational redesign, created the condition for a new phenomenon in industrial society. The digital firm is organization where nearly all significant business processes and relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled, and key corporate assets are managed through digital means. Business processes refer to the unique ways in which organizations coordinate and organization work activities, information, and knowledge to produce a product or service.