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Chapter 2 Global E-business and Collaboration 83

Contemporary business intelligence and analytics technology have
promoted data-driven management, where decision makers rely heavily on
analytical tools and data at their fingertips to guide their work. Data captured
at the factory or sales floor level are immediately available for high-level
or detailed views in executive dashboards and reports. It's real-time
management. The Interactive Session on Management illustrates informa-
tion-driven management at work in Procter & Gamble (P&G), a world-class
corporation.

SYSTEMS FOR LINKING THE ENTERPRISE

Reviewing all the different types of systems we have just described, you might
wonder how a business can manage all the information in these different
systems. You might also wonder how costly it is to maintain so many different
systems. And you might wonder how all these different systems can share
information and how managers and employees are able to coordinate their
work. In fact, these are all important questions for businesses today.

Enterprise Applications
Getting all the different kinds of systems in a company to work together has
proven a major challenge. Typically, corporations are put together both through
normal “organic” growth and through acquisition of smaller firms. Over a
period of time, corporations end up with a collection of systems, most of them
older, and face the challenge of getting them all to “talk” with one another
and work together as one corporate system. There are several solutions to this
problem.
One solution is to implement enterprise applications, which are systems
that span functional areas, focus on executing business processes across the
business firm, and include all levels of management. Enterprise applications
help businesses become more flexible and productive by coordinating their
business processes more closely and integrating groups of processes so they
focus on efficient management of resources and customer service.
There are four major enterprise applications: enterprise systems, supply
chain management systems, customer relationship management systems,
and knowledge management systems. Each of these enterprise applications
integrates a related set of functions and business processes to enhance the
performance of the organization as a whole. Figure 2.6 on page 86 shows that the
architecture for these enterprise applications encompasses processes spanning
the entire organization and, in some cases, extending beyond the organization
to customers, suppliers, and other key business partners.

Enterprise Systems Firms use enterprise systems, also known as
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, to integrate business processes
in manufacturing and production, finance and accounting, sales and
marketing, and human resources into a single software system. Information
that was previously fragmented in many different systems is stored in a single
comprehensive data repository where it can be used by many different parts
of the business.
For example, when a customer places an order, the order data flow
automatically to other parts of the company that are affected by them. The
order transaction triggers the warehouse to pick the ordered products and
schedule shipment. The warehouse informs the factory to replenish what-
ever has been depleted. The accounting department is notified to send the

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