Chapter 12 : Enterprise Resource Planning

Shell Canada Productivity with ERP

1. How did ERP help improve business operations at Shell?
• The ERP system has helped the company immensely in terms of reducing and streamlining the highly manual process of third-party contractors submitting repair information and invoices. On average, there are between 2500 and 4000 service orders handled by these contractors per month on a nationwide basis.
2. How could extended ERP components help improve business operations at Shell?
• By this ERP system, it takes only a few minutes for a contractor to enter details about a service order. This information also can be transmitted through a wireless PDA to the appropriate Shell manager for immediate approval.
• Another bonus of the ERP system is that the contractor's monthly summarized invoices can be generated automatically and fed directly into the the ERP system's account payables application for processing. No rekeying of data required and if there is an issue or concern with one invoice item, the other items on the invoice can still be processed for payment.
3. What advice would you give Shell if it decided to choose a different ERP software solution?
• ERP system is easy to use because the past systems used by refinery workers were complex and difficult to search for information. The ERP system in place now has a portal-like interface that allows refinery workers to access the functions and information they need to keep operations running. The web interface allows workers access to this information with one or two clicks of a mouse.
4. How can integrating SCM, CRM, and ERP help improve business operations at Shell?
• SCM, CRM and ERP are the backbone of e-business,these applications is the key to success for many companies and allows the unlocking of information to make it available to any user, anywhere, and anytime.
• With new system,employees across the company have gained fast and easy access to the tools and information they need to conduct their daily operations.

Chapter 10: Supply Chain Management

Learning Outcomes

List and describe the components of a typical supply chain.

Supplier’s Supplier, Supplier, Manufacturer, Distributor, Retailer, Customer,  Customer’s customer.

Define the relationship between decision making and supply chain management.

SCM enhances decision making. Collecting, analyzing, and distributing transactional information to all relevant parties, SCM systems help all the different entities in the supply chain work together more effectively. SCM systems provide dynamic holistic views of organizations.  Users can “drill down” into detailed analyses of supply chain activities in a process analogous to DSS. Without SCM systems, organizations would be unable to make accurate and timely decisions regarding their supply chain.

Describe the four changes resulting from advances in IT that are driving supply chains.

Although people have been talking about the integrated supply chain for a long time, it has only been recently that advances in information technology have made it possible to bring the idea to life and truly integrate the supply chain. Visibility, consumer behaviour  competition, and speed are a few of the changes resulting from advances in information technology that are driving supply chains.

Summarize the best practices for implementing a successful supply chain management system.

The following are the SCM industry best practices: 

Make the sale to suppliers - A large part of any SCM system extends beyond the organization to the suppliers.  Since the organization has very little control over anything external to itself, these pieces are typically the most complicated.Be sure suppliers are on board with the benefits that the SCM system will provide to ease SCM implementation difficulties.

Wean employees off traditional business practices - If the organization cannot convince people that using the SCM software is worthwhile, the employees will probably find a way around using the software.

Ensure the SCM system supports the organizational goals - Be sure to select SCM software that supports organizational goals and strategies.

Deploy in Incremental phases and measure and communicate success - Designing the deployment of the SCM system in incremental phases is the most successful deployment method.The BIG BANG approach – implementing everything at once – fails 90 percent of the time.Be future oriented - An SCM system, like all systems, must scale to meet future demands.

Chapter 11: Customer Relationship Management

Opening Case Study Questions Second Life

Question 1 :

• Why is it important for any company to use customer relationship management strategies to manage customer information? 

Answer 1 : 

• Customer relation management is the technologies that can help organizations answer tough questions such as who are their best customers and which of their products are the most profitable. Next,customer relationship management solutions make organizational business processes more intelligent. This is achieved by understanding customer behaviour and preferences, then realigning product and service offerings and related communications to make sure they are synchronized with customer needs and preferences. 

 Question 2 :

• If the virtual world is the first point of contract between a company and its customers, how might that transform the entire shopping experience?

Answer 2 :

• It can easy for the customer when do a transaction, and do not be physically at the place such as when  shopping.
• It can save our time and energy to find the product or service that we want.
• If we as a seller,we can know the footprint and background of our customer and what kind of product she or he always search or buying.

Chapter 9 : Decision Making

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Four most common categories of AI include :

• Genetic Algorithms -An artificial intelligent system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.It essentially an optimizing system, it finds the combination of inputs that give the best outputs.Useful when search space very large or too complex for analytic treatment.In each iteration (generation) possible solutions or individuals represented as strings of numbers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Intelligent Agents -  is an autonomous entity which observes through sensors and acts upon an environment using actuators  and directs its activity towards achieving goals . Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals. They may be very simple or very complex, a reflex machine such as a thermostat is an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is a community of human beings working together towards a goal.
  

• Expert System - in the financial field is expert system for mortgages.. Loan departments are interested in expert systems for mortgages because of the growing cost of labour, which makes the handling and acceptance of relatively small loans less profitable. They also see a possibility for standardized, efficient handling of mortgages loan by applying expert systems, appreciating that for the acceptance of mortgages there are hard and fast rules which do not always exist with other types of loans.

• NEURAL NETWORKS - Consider a real estate appraiser whose job is to predict the sale price of residential houses. As with the Bank Loans example, the input pattern consists of a group of numbers.For example,number of bedrooms, number of stories, floor area, age of construction, neighbourhood prices, size of lot, and distance to schools. This problem is similar to the Bank Loans example, because it has many non-linearities, and is subject to millions of possible inputs patterns. The difference here is that the output prediction will consist of a calculated value the selling price of the house. It is possible to train the neural network to simulate the opinion of an expert appraiser, or to predict the actual selling price.