Unit 1 MIS

Shilpi Mahajan

MAIMS

Recent Developments in MIS

1. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

ERP integrates internal and external management information across an entire organization,
embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship
management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application. Its
purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the
boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders.

ERP systems can run on a variety of hardware and network configurations, typically employing a
database as a repository for information.

ERP systems typically include the following characteristics:

 An integrated system that operates in real time (or next to real time), without relying on
periodic updates.
 A common database, which supports all applications.
 A consistent look and feel throughout each module.
 Installation of the system without elaborate application/data integration by the
Information Technology (IT) department.

2. Customer relationship management (CRM)

CRM is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with

customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize,
automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those
for marketing, customer service, and technical support.

The overall goals are:

 to find, attract, and win new clients,

 nurture and retain those the company already has,
 entice former clients back into the fold
 Reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including

customer-interface departments as well as other departments.
 3. Enterprise feedback management (EFM)

EFM is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage
deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization.
EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of
users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and
translators.

EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers
regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer specific real time
interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Prior to EFM, survey software was typically deployed in departments and lacked user roles,
permissions and workflow. EFM enables deployment across the enterprise, providing decision
makers with important data for increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value. EFM
enables companies to look at customers "holistically" and to better respond to customer needs.

EFM applications support complex survey design, with features such as question and page
rotation, quota management and advanced skip patterns and branching. The software typically
offers advanced reporting with stastical analysis and centralized panel management. EFM
applications are often integrated with external platforms, most typically with CRM systems but
also with HRIS systems and generic web portals.

4. E-procurement

Electronic procurment sometimes also known as supplier exchange, is the business to

business or business to customers or business to government purchase and sale of supplies,
Work and services through the internet as well as other information and networking systems,
such as ERP.

E-procurement is done with a software application that includes features for supplier
management and complex auctions. The new generation of E-Procurement is now on-demand or
a software-as-a-service.

There are seven main types of e-procurement:

 Web-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Creating and approving purchasing

requisitions, placing purchase orders and receiving goods and services by using a
software system based on Internet technology.
 e-MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul): The same as web-based ERP except that
the goods and services ordered are non-product related MRO supplies.
 e-sourcing: Identifying new suppliers for a specific category of purchasing requirements
using Internet technology.
 e-tendering: Sending requests for information and prices to suppliers and receiving the
responses of suppliers using Internet technology. May or may not involve e-auctions.
  e-reverse auctioning: Using Internet technology to buy goods and services from a
number of known or unknown suppliers.
 e-informing: Gathering and distributing purchasing information both from and to internal
and external parties using Internet technology.
 e-marketsites: Expands on Web-based ERP to open up value chains. Buying
communities can access preferred suppliers' products and services, add to shopping carts,
create requisition, seek approval, receipt purchase orders and process electronic invoices
with integration to suppliers' supply chains and buyers' financial systems.

5. Supply chain management

SCM is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate

provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996).
Supply chain management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process
inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption.

Another definition is provided by the APICS Dictionary when it defines SCM as the "design,
planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of
creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics,
synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally."

Supply chain management is the systematic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions
and the tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within
the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies
and the supply chain as a whole (Mentzer et al., 2001).

6. Data mining

A relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer Science. It is the process of

discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods from statistics and artificial
intelligence but also database management. In contrast to for example machine learning, the
emphasis lies on the discovery of previously unknown patterns as opposed to generalizing
known patterns to new data.

The term is a buzzword, and is frequently misused to mean any form of large scale data or
information processing (collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis and statistics) but also
generalized to any kind of computer system support system including artificial intelligence.

The actual data mining task is the automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large quantities of
data in order to extract previously unknown interesting patterns such as groups of data records
(cluster analysis), unusual records (anomaly detection) and dependencies. For example, the data
mining step might identify multiple groups in the data, which can then be used to obtain more
accurate prediction results by a decision support system. Neither the data collection, data
preparation or result interpretation and reporting are part of the data mining step, but do belong
to the overall data mining process as additional steps.
 7. Data Warehousing

In computing, a data warehouse (DW) is a database used for reporting and analysis. The data
stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an
operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting.

A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers: staging, integration, and access. Staging
is used to store raw data for use by developers. The integration layer is used to integrate data and
to have a level of abstraction from users. The access layer is for getting data out for users.

This definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. The main source of the data is
cleaned, transformed, catalogued and made available for use by managers and other business
professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support
(Marakas & O'Brien 2009). However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract,
transform and load data, and to manage the data dictionary are also considered essential
components of a data warehousing system.

8. Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to

the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet
and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and
selling products online. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing,
selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services. The amount of trade
conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use
of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic
fund transfer, supply chain management, internet marketing, online transaction processing,
electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data
collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the world wide web at least
at one point in the transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of
technologies such ase-mail, mobile devices and telephones as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely in electronic form for virtual
items such as access to premium content on a website, but mostly electronic commerce involves
the transportation of physical items in some way.