School of Information Systems

Enterprise Resource Planning

What is ERP? I believe at least once we already heard about that. Enterprise Resource Planning or we called ERP is a system that meant to integrate data and support all the major functions of organizations. The benefit of an ERP is to make the information flow dynamic and immediate, so it will be increasing it’s usefulness and value. ERP have many of business processes built into the logic of the system. When organization want to implement ERP, they have two choices, change business processes to match the software (ERP) functionality or modify the ERP software to match the business processes.

ERP has 5 components; hardware, software, information, process and people, all of this must work together so when we are implementing ERP, they will success. But before implement ERP we must thinking it carefully, because there are limitations of an ERP. We need to be ready to make the change and also prepare our self for the worst condition. But why many organizations still implement ERP? The main factor is how information is integrated into a typical organization using an ERP system. For example, information like plan generation, purchasing, subcontracting, receiving, payments, stock issue orders, sales, shipping and receivable. These systems also help when it was hard to manage business processes because hosted in different databases and need much updates.
Many organizations in Indonesia already implemented ERP such as Telkomsel, Semen Gresik, Garuda Indonesia, Jasa Marga, BCA and many more. Not only high-size organizations, mid-size organizations also already implemented ERP system. Many reasons to implement ERP mostly to help to integrated data and make business processes easier. But also, many organizations failed when they try to implement ERP. Some reason why they failed, lack of information, organization not ready to implement yet, choose the wrong vendor, bad planning, etc.

After all of this, do you still want to implement ERP for your organization? Even ERP has many advantages, we still need to planning, researching, asking other organization that already implemented ERP, searching for vendor, asking all divisions opinion about this. Well planned ERP will take more time but make more advantages than we are in hurry to implement it. Because we can end up loss after spending money for ERP even the worst bankrupt. It’s okay to be late to implement ERP than we need to start all over again. Better late than never.

You can ask other organizations about how they implemented, they planning and what kind of vendor that they used. Based on this information, we can analyse it then we will get the best result. We also can more understand why some organization gain more profit and why some organization slump when they both implement ERP. It’s easy to see why ERP become so popular these days and why organization race to implement it. Don’t be hurry when you are planning to implement ERP, satisfying result need more time and more effort.

Shinta Jessica