In Mammone's industry, mistakes are very costly, as there are only about a dozen manufacturers of airplane engines in the world. He says you can't afford to annoy any of them. One key benefit of ERP systems is the way it integrates a company's flow of information. Using an ERP system, the sales, purchasing, production, inventory control and accounting departments all use the same information. One set of data is used throughout the company to make sure customers get what they want when they want it, and that the whole thing is profitable for the company. ERP systems do just what you'd expect a business application to do: record customer orders and purchase orders, keep track of inventory, create invoices, handle all the accounting including sales, accounts payable and receivable, and budgeting. Another important advantage of ERP is that it provides information to support the information manager's need to manage: things such as performance indicators, and alerts to situations such as shortages or shortfalls from quotas, and bottlenecks. An ERP system is not something that you can pull out of a box or install from a CD-ROM; every implementation is customized to fit the needs of the enterprise. Any company installing a new ERP system can pick and choose modules, or can phase in the implementation over months or years. For instance, you might want to start with only the core ERP back office functions such as accounting, payments, inventory and sales. Then add human resources planning, strategic procurement or e-commerce as you become used to the new system. You could phase in your ERP solution as your older systems become obsolete, one at a time. Naturally, this approach requires a lot of programming to integrate the new system into the old one. THE PAYOFFS OF EPRManufacturers with fully functional ERP systems report the following benefits:Reduced inventories 50%Reduced order-cycle times 43%Increased production capacity 36%Lower total logist...
