Union of Operations and Decisions in ERP systems
The integration between operations support systems and business intelligence systems continues to increase until the appearance of ERP systems, Enterprise Resource Planning, which assume the role of single information system for the life of the company. These systems, which reached their maximum diffusion in the 90s, are substantially used in all medium/large companies and are spreading more and more in medium/small companies.
The leading product in this market is SAP.
The adoption of an ERP (not necessarily SAP) is a new beginning for the company: the consolidation of information and its centralized, but modularized management, allows complex reasoning logics (study of income margins, solvency / insolvency scenarios โฆ).
So translating the structure of a company into a model for an ERP is a good way to fully understand how companies are structured and how they work. With ERPs, however, it is difficult to capture the essence of companies as โknowledge generatorsโ, and it becomes impossible to represent them in all their details.
In fact, the problem of company representation arises from the fact that the ERP systems currently present are based on a single hierarchical functional company model (ARIS model), while in the modern world it is common to identify organizations with a matrix structure, in which people do not have a single dependency (from the supervisor), but double: one for the functional area (knowledge that individual people have, for example a designer has a reference "chief designer") and one for the employment (the project in which they are working, for example the designer has a โproject leaderโ for the project he is currently working on).
There are therefore multiple managers for a single employee, with potential conflict situations.
Furthermore, ERPs have limitations linked to the company's variability: a company cannot predict how it will evolve and how it will change. The IT system must necessarily adapt to changes in the company, but sometimes the ERP is too structured to be able to keep up with the evolution of the company and this defect in turn introduces a rigidity that arises as an obstacle to company evolution.
Ultimately, when deciding on an ERP, one must understand:
- integration data collected: ERPs obviously cannot ignore data collected of companies, which are many and are disorganized, there is a need to use data warehouses
- what problems arise managing the company entirely with the ERP, therefore what are the distinctive characteristics of the company that adopts a certain ERP and which of them have to do with these problems (e.g. characteristics typical of companies in a certain country, e.g. the Italian ones are distinguished by tradition and family management, medium-small size, resistance to change)
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