ERP (Click Here for SAP Courses)

ERP is the unique feature of IIMS, as very few institutes provides this valuable course in Eastern India. The details are:

Integration of Management Education and ERP

The mix of Management Education and ERP is aimed at developing a unique blend of technical and commercial skills required by business consultants and managers who may, simultaneously, be involved in managing change, redesigning business processes, specifying systems and optimizing business benefits.

Most organizations today operate in an environment where information is often the unique resource, and knowledge the primary asset boosting their competitive advantage. To prosper they must be able to identify the risks and exploit the opportunities that this rapidly changing informational environment will bring to their business. Even more important is the need for people who know how to exploit that information fully.

Data has become a commodity. Modern organizations must be able to capture, analyses, combine, communicate and use it at speed and volume. This brings as many problems as solutions. Organizations therefore need to develop managers who can work with business and IT specialists to shape information and knowledge strategies.

These managers must be able to forge the link between the business and the IT, as technology is the key ingredient, which propels organizational effort in most contemporary companies today. They must be able to provide leadership to make and carry out information policies and provide direction to the business operations. To do this, they need a thorough understanding of both areas.

Most Business Schools abroad have already introduced ERP as a specialization in their MBA and other post-graduate programs in order to enable companies to harvest a pool of such professionals. This concept is however gaining foothold in India and is still in its infancy but shall soon become the reality of tomorrow.

In order to elucidate it further take a customer order, for example. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different departments’ computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse’s computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. "You’ll have to call the warehouse" is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers. ERP vanquishes the old standalone computer systems in finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse, and replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly approximate the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors’ ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of the functions for another day. There are obviously many more complex benefits derived out of ERP implementations in an organization which can help in planning, organizing, directing and controlling almost all facets, therefore making it important for the business controllers and managers to be adequately educated on ERP systems.

ERP and Managers

Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs.

That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.

That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly and manage it in an effective manner. Most of these departments within a company are managed by managers who are trained in their specific skill areas but typically have no knowledge about ERP systems and its management. ERP is the vision of most prudent companies and any manager without this knowledge will have one of the most important facet of his skill-set missing. Companies of tomorrow will prefer to hire management professionals already trained on ERP systems rather than incurring costs and spending time to get them trained later. Therefore, it makes all the more sense to capitalize on the ERP knowledge while pursuing the management education.

Why SAP out of all ERP Softwares

ERP software integrates all major business processes, which helps ensure consistent data flow across all functional departments. ERP applications typically consist of modules such as Marketing and Sales, Field Service, Production, Inventory Control, Procurement, Distribution, Human Resources, Finance, and Accounting.

SAP offers an effective blend of enterprise resource planning solutions for customer relationship management, partner relationship management, supply chain management, and online analysis and processing. This gives managers the ability to make qualified business decisions based on a seamless, 360-degree view of the business, customers and vendors. SAP holds the biggest market share of nearly 65% among all ERP solutions in the market today and its capability to integrate seamlessly with all available systems makes it an ideal choice among the business tycoons today. Therefore the job market for an SAP trained management graduate is extremely hot and in great demand.