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Preface
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Finance, and Human Resources. This chapter also describes how a business
process cuts across the activities within business functional areas and why
managers need to think about making business processes work.
• Chapter 2, “The Development of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems,”
provides a short history of business computing and the developments that led
to today’s ERP systems. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of ERP issues
and an introduction to the SAP ERP software.
• Chapter 3, “Marketing Information Systems and the Sales Order Process,”
describes the Marketing and Sales functional area, and it highlights the pro-
blems that arise with unintegrated information systems. To make concepts easy
to understand, the Fitter Snacker running example is introduced. After
explaining Fitter Snacker’s problems with its unintegrated systems, we show
how an ERP system can help a company avoid these problems. Sample SAP ERP
screens are used to illustrate the concepts. Because using ERP can naturally
lead a company into ever-broadening systems’ integration, a discussion of
customer-relationship management (CRM) software concludes the chapter.
• Chapter 4, “Production and Supply Chain Management Information Systems,”
describes how ERP systems support Supply Chain Management—the coordi-
nated activities of all the organizations involved in converting raw materials
into consumer products on the retail shelf. As in Chapter 3, the problems
caused by Fitter Snacker’s unintegrated information system are explored,
followed by a discussion of how ERP software could help solve these problems.
• Chapter 5, “Accounting in ERP Systems,” describes accounting processes and
how ERP systems support those processes. This chapter clearly distinguishes
between financial accounting (FI) and managerial accounting (CO) issues.
Included is an overview of the Enron collapse and the resulting Sarbanes-
Oxley Act along with the act’s impact on information systems, specifically
management controls and audit capabilities. XBRL—and its relationship to
ERP systems and financial reporting—is explored, along with the transition to
the IFRS accounting standards.
• Chapter 6, “Human Resources Processes with ERP,” covers human resource
management. While the Human Resource software module is the least
integrated component of all ERP systems, it includes numerous processes
that are critical to a company’s success, including strategic issues like
succession planning.
• Chapter 7, “Process Modeling, Process Improvement, and ERP Implementation,”
first presents flowcharting basics, followed by the highly structured EPC process
model. Implementation issues conclude the chapter. We believe that process
improvement, not large-scale implementation, should be the focus in an intro-
ductory ERP course.
• Chapter 8, “RFID, Business Intelligence (BI), Mobile Computing, and the
Cloud,” covers current technologies that are impacting ERP systems. In this
edition, the text covers radio frequency identification (RFID), business intel-
ligence (BI) and in-memory computing, mobile computing, and the cloud.
Because technology changes rapidly, this chapter provides an introduction to
these current topics, rather than an exhaustive treatment of the subjects, and
the instructor will likely want to provide current supplements.

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