Week 9

    The biggest challenge a company faces when implementing an enterprise system is it's compatibility with their existing business processes. Enterprise systems take a long time to integrate into a company and they must be able to make a swift change in this long process. They have to be able to continue their services while moving into new processes for completing these services. Doing this change without any stalls in service can be crucial for the company as it has been shown that if there are any major hiccups in the implementation, it could mean loss of customers, profits, efficiency, or even complete failure of the company. This risk makes implementing any enterprise system into a company a very serious challenge and should be taken into account in the decision of using an enterprise system or not.
    This week I read Chapter 9. We went over customer relationship management systems on Tuesday in class. I aced the "quiz" we had on Tuesday by just showing up and writing my name on a paper. Then on Thursday we went over the other part of the section dealing with supply chain management. Now today I am collaborating with Justin Jones on the assessment over comparing two enterprise system software from two companies. We chose Oracle's Siebel Systems CRM 8.0 and Saleforce.com's CRM. Today I am also finishing up my blog for the week.
    This week I read Chapter 9 which was about enterprise systems, systems that span across multiple departments in a company. It was then broken down into supply chain management and customer relationship management systems. I learned that supply chain management systems include a company's upstream chain including their suppliers, their secondary suppliers (suppliers' suppliers), and their tertiary suppliers (suppliers' suppliers' suppliers). The company's downstream chain may include their distributors, retailers, and customers. These supply chains can be big or small depending on the kind of business a company does and how they approach that business. Supply chain management systems analyzes the date that flows through this chain and provides solutions to keep costs down, inventory not too high or too low, and keep the demands of the customers met. I also learned that customer relationship management systems look at the relationship with the companies customers and devises solutions on how to gain a higher intimacy with that customer and how to push products to the right people to raise profits. Overall I learned from this chapter that enterprise systems can be very helpful to companies. However, I also learned that they are often expensive, hard to implement, and only useful for certain business. That was my ninth week in Organizations, Applications, and Technology. It was a very hard week for me with all this midterm preparation at the same time but I believe I did my best and that my efforts were satisfactory for not only the class but for myself as well. I hope you enjoyed the reading!