So, you might be wondering about why do you need to take this class and how would knowledge about enterprise systems help you in your career. Well, I can offer you three main good reasons for that. If you were to take a look at most of the modern day companies, you will find that most of these companies are using some form of enterprise system. So, by learning about enterprise system, you can actually work better at your job, and because of this fact that most of the companies are actually using enterprise systems. Major business schools have recognized this and incorporated a course on ERP systems in the MIS department. At the same time, regardless of what major you're coming from, the best way to learn about a company and its activities is to have a close examination of ERP systems because the features of ERP systems tend to cut across different business departments and functions. So, if we were to examine that, you will be able to learn about the activities that outer departments and the entire company works. So, with that, let me also give you some concrete examples of jobs that are directly related to the use and to the sales of ERP systems. So, if we were to take a look at a company that sells and implements ERP systems, for instance, SAP, you find these positions, all right? At the very forefront of the sales side, we will have a sales associate whose main job is to engage with potential clients and companies that are in need are using enterprise system. So, they need to know the features on the abilities of enterprise systems pretty well in order to make a pitch and to convince companies to buy them. At the same time, the sales associate that works very closely with a pre-sales engineer, who would actually design and to produce a demonstration of the features to the clients. After the sales has been made, the next step is to implement the system at the company. For that purpose, we would engage functional and technical consultants. The role of the functional consultant is to mainly talk to the end users at the company, learn about their day to day business roles, and to translate these user requirements into logical and technical views that dictates how the ERP system works. He has to work closely with the technical consultant who designs, and to also make changes in the way how the system runs. Because ERP systems are huge massive softwares that has various modules spanning across different business activities. It's quite likely that we would need to have a good overall view of how different modules work together. For that purpose, we need to engage a system architect who designs the overall blueprint for the system. He still want to go to if we need to ask to see if sudden changes could be made, so that the overall system could run properly. Finally we have at the top of a group, a implementation group, a project manager. A project manager is responsible for leading the entire implementation team. He or she has to be aware of the risks in terms of costs, and also in terms of the duration of the project. That's the reason why his or her job is to mainly to secure resources to design budgets, and to design the activities for the team. Because of the strategic role that a project manager does, he or she sometimes have to provide influence, and also to persuade, and adjust the expectation of the clients. At some times, she would also have to do the same in terms of expectation management with the company that she's working at. So, even if you're not working directly for a company that sells and makes ERP system, quite likely you would still be using enterprise systems, if you're looking for one of these big companies such as Walmart, Intel, Apple, HP. In fact, what we know today is that all of the Fortune 1,000 companies out there use some form of ERP systems. So, if you are working for a major company there's a good chance that you'll be dealing and working on ERP system on a day to day basis. So, one of the best ways for students to see why this class is relevant to them is to see how this class can be used in actual job itself. This is the reason why I design an activity for all my students for this class, which is for students to go onto the Internet to search for possible jobs that are related to ERP, and at the same time, note down the job title, the description of the job, and also certain characteristics that's related to the job. So, allow me to take the next few minutes to illustrate how you can do this, and after this is done, you can go and take your time to such online for a job that is related to ERP, take notes about it, and then discuss what you have found with your classmates in this class. So, what I did is to go online and the first job that I found to be related to ERP appearing on my screen is one of the ERP administrator. So, let me just take down these few things related to this little activity. So, the job title and also the description. Basically, this is based on our search result, the very first one that came up for me that appear relevant to ERP in the United States is an ERP administrator. The job scope of a ERP administrator includes, from what I found from the website, is to ensure reliable performance of ERPs, and that includes things like troubleshooting, resolving ERP related hardware and software. So, a requirement here in described as part of the job scope which is to coordinate software releases, fixes, and upgrades to the ERP. All right. So, and another thing that you want to know, then this would be quite possibly of interest to you is, how well does the job pays, right? What is the average annual salary that this job pays to you? From what I found in this case here is that, in the US, the role of a ERP admin pays 75,000 to about, in the range of 75,000-85,000. Then, the next thing that I would also ask you to do in this activity is to name two companies or industries that offers this job, and what I found in this listing is that it's available in the biotech. Health care, industries, and also, very widely, industries that are more familiar to us, retail and wholesale and even in transportation. Alright, so we can just put transportation here. The next two things that I would ask you to do over here is to do a reflection. Sometimes this might be already given to you on the job search, sometimes it's not. What kind of skills type or personality traits needed for this job. What I found on the website was that sometimes they list out the education level required. In this case, they were specifically seeking people with bachelor degree in business administration or in Information System, so IS for short. They we're also hoping to get people who have two to eight years of experience supporting ERPs. Then finally, the last part. This might not be always available to you, but you'll want to sort of think about the different roles that you need to do in this job and come out with some of the personality traits that you would need to have in order to do this job well. So, in order to troubleshoot and help users with ERP related software or hardware, releasing fixes, and doing upgrades to ERP, quite likely, you will need to have problem solving skills. You would also, because of the need to talk to people, to communicate with users on your needs, it's quite likely that person doing the administration position, would also need humans skills and communication skills. Then the last thing that I will ask you to do and is activity is to answer this on your own based on what you see, so far, we will relate it to this jobs, would you be interested in this job? Why and why not? Alright. So, I will not put an answer over here. This is for you to figure out for you to honestly think through this different sets of jobs to see if it's relevant to you. Alright. So, this will be an activity for you to do, and I will list this as a activity plus a discussion. So, once you have come up with two different ERP related jobs, note down the specifics of it, and then you could talk to your peers or classmates about what you have found. So, let's take a look at the different topics that we'll be covering in our course. Our course is split up into four different sessions. The very first session, we will be looking at the introduction aspects of ERP systems. So, we will be discussing about things like what are ERPs, and why do companies actually need them. So, to give you a hint, this is related to the use of business process in companies. In our second session, we will dive more deeply into business process. We will get to see examples of business processes, and actually get to see how that affects the modeling and the usage of ERP systems through be example of SAP. Because of that we will be talking about the different data types that SAP uses to model entities within business processes. Finally, at the end of the second session, we'll be seeing the example of the sales order-process playing out in SAP. In our third session, we'll be looking at the managerial aspects related to the use and a selection of ERP systems. Specifically, we'll be looking at the issues on how to select the right ERP for your company and also the trade-offs and also the benefits related to your different choices. In our final session, the fourth session, we will be talking about a very important topic of change management, because ERP systems, when they are being implemented in a company, that represents a huge change to the way how workers perform their job. So, it's needed for change management techniques to come in so that the ERP implementation would have the minimum amount of disruption to the way work is being done. So, we'll be talking about what change management is, we'll be talking about how to manage ERP implementation using different techniques, and also how do we select the right implementation partners to help us with the usage and implementation of ERP systems. We will also want to spend some time to talk about the objective of this course. By the end of this course, I hope that you will be familiar with the concepts and the vocabularies that we use in the world of ERP systems. At the same time, you should be getting a better appreciation of end-to-end business processes and the interrelationships that different departments play when executing a business process. Now, this is a very important thing to have because ERP systems are modeled after business processes. So, a good understanding of how business processes work, you get to also at the same time understand how ERP systems work. At a broad level, we will be also look at the managerial considerations related to the use of ERP systems. In particular, we'll be looking at two major steps. For first steps is to look at the acquisition and also the selection of enterprise systems, and also the next step that we will be concerned with is the implementation and the maintaining the use of your enterprise systems. So, a note to half-way here is that this is a class that's not focus on the technical aspects of enterprise systems. That means we are not looking at the programming, the scripting and also the middleware integration aspects of enterprise systems. But instead, we are focused on looking at the managerial considerations and also the strategic implications of the use of enterprise systems in companies.
