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Chapter 2 • Systems Integration 37

BENEFITS
The key advantage of the e-Enterprise system is that it links contracts managed in the line-
of-business applications to financial records. “Once we agree on rates, terms, and hours of
operation with a contractor, they are entered into our contracts administration system,” says
Sally Hartmann, ACI’s CFO. “In the past, we had to reenter that information into the finan-
cial system manually and hope that we remembered to adjust it if there were changes in the
contract. But now, we automatically move this information from the accounting system to
the contract management system. And we have the ability to move that information in the
other direction as well, which we didn’t have in the past.” The key benefit here is that if a
contractor stops paying its bills, the warehouse system will immediately alert the dispatch
people. Hartmann adds: “We are also completing a direct link from our human resources to
our accounting system. This will eliminate another area of manual data entry and reduce the
potential for errors.”
Hartman ultimately sees three other advantages accruing to ACI from this ERP
conversion. These are as follows:
•“Based on what I have seen so far, I am estimating that we will reduce our adminis-
trative workload by about 10 percent, primarily by reducing manual data entry.”
•“With the ERP system, we will provide more accurate, complete, and timely informa-
tion to decision makers.”
•“We are moving heavily into e-commerce, and e-Enterprise provides the building blocks
that enable two-way information flow between e-business and financial systems.”
The ACI case highlights some of the problems with heterogeneous systems and how
they can affect the various departments within the company from Accounting to
Warehousing. The systems integration at ACI has introduced some benefits and drawbacks.
The question remains whether their benefits outweigh the drawbacks. What do you think?

PREVIEW

In the Air Cargo case, you can see what happened to functional departments when a company
moves from silo systems to an enterprise information system (EIS). The critical benefit from such
conversions is usually the elimination of manual data re-entry (i.e., rekeying information from one
functional application into another). Another benefit is the reduced dependence on spreadsheets to
generate management reports and to answer special management queries. The drawbacks of imple-
menting integrated systems can include the high cost of implementing an ERP system, the required
process changes to benefit from the new system, and training the employees to use this new system.
In today’s organization, integration of information systems (IS) is very critical for their
survival and growth. Systems integration means that you allow a heterogeneous (hodgepodge)
IS to communicate or integrate and share information (or data) seamlessly with one another. It
is important to understand that the keyword here is seamless because systems have shared
information with each other for a long time; however, they required a human link. Information
generated from one system had to be re-entered manually by users into other systems, as
illustrated in the Air Cargo case. This case also shows the typical problems faced by an organiza-
tion with a manual data integration process. First, it takes much longer to get information into
the system, there are errors and inaccuracies, and information sharing cannot happen in real time