ASSIGNMENT

Over the past 40 years Enterprise Resource Planning has had a tremendous impact on how companies administer their business. For many of those years, it has been accessible, financially, only to large corporations; but that has since changed. Small business ERP has now become a booming a vibrant market. Web-based ERP is largely responsible for this trend. By removing the need for on-site servers and storage and providing an online hosted software system that offers all of the applications modules required to run a business, this software as a service or cloud computing, allows a business to pull all of the applications they need from the platform, to run the business. And what a difference it has made. Traditionally applied ERP with on-site servers, storage, training and maintenance can easily cost over a million dollars to deploy. With a Web-based application you pay only a subscription fee, per user, based on the number of users. This has given small businesses the opportunity to experience greater economies of scale, and to operate in such a way as to appear larger than they actually are. And it has made small and midsized businesses the biggest ERP implementers in the market today. The large corporation market for ERP is sluggish right now; but SMBs are picking up the slack. This software has influenced the operating practices of small businesses in every industry, from manufacturing, services, distribution, hospitality, retail and beyond. It has given small companies a more powerful support platform from which to work; and the results have been very revealing. Small businesses utilizing this software have improved productivity, reduced costs and boosted profits; and many of them will tell you that the proof is in the putting. Its no wonder that small business ERP has taken off to the extent that increasing numbers of small companies are implementing Web-based enterprise applications. If yours is a small business that could use some re-engineering, you might want to look into enterprise software. It not only provides all of the business processing applications you need, it also gives you diagnostic tools to track your status and progress. If you want to administer your operations more cohesively and comprehensively, you should think seriously about small business ERP. It can broaden your reach and increase your visibility. Check out some demos from enterprise vendors and see how this software might benefit your business.

ERP Benefits:

Help reduce operating costs: ERP software attempts to integrate business

processes across departments onto a single enterprise-wide information system. The major benefits of ERP are improved coordination across functinal departments and increased efficiencies of doing business. The immediate benefit from implementing ERP systems we can expect is reduced operating costs, such as lower inventory control cost, lower production costs, lower marketing costs and lower help desk support costs. Facilitate Day-to-Day Management: The other benefits from implementing ERP systems is facilitation of day-to-day management . The implementations of ERP systems nurture the establishment of backbone data warehouses. ERP systems offer better accessibility to data so that management can have up-to-the-minute access to information for decision making and managerial control. ERP software helps track actual costs of activities and perform activity based costing. Support Strategic Planning: Strategic Planning is "a deliberate set of steps that assess needs and resources; define a target audience and a set of goals and objectives; plan and design coordinated strategies with evidence of success; logically connect these strategies to needs, assets, and desired outcomes; and measure and evaluate the process and outcomes." Part of ERP software systems is designed to support resource planning portion of strategic planning. In reality, resource planning has been the weakest link in ERP practice due to the complexity of strategic planning and lack of adequate integration with Decision Support Systems (DSS).

OVERVIEW OF ERP IN HEALTH CARE:

Enterprise Resource Planning has been the ultimate solution to many sectors and healthcare is no exception. Hospitals require more connectivity because the information to be passed is vital and will not serve the purpose if it does not reach in time. Unlike other business wherein the loss could be measured only in monetary terms the loss in this sector is in terms of human lives. The healthcare industry is focused on improving the quality of healthcare and operational efficiency while reducing costs and optimizing back-end operations. To maximize profits, reduce costs and achieve a seamless healthcare continuum, it is imperative to improve the efficiency of back-end business functions across supply chain management, inventory management, patient relationship management, human resources, finance and billing. It can be achieved by business process optimization and technology enablement through successful Healthcare Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation.

ERP IN HEALTH CARE:

Reasons for the increased demand of ERP in healthcare:

To Adopt Best Practices: As hospitals multiply at a fast pace there is a constant urge to induce professionalism and best practices in the industry. In this context patients demand more than the previous days. They naturally want the best return for the money. When the industry is developing at a great speed with the two elements namely business and service gets stirred in proportions. In this situation no hospital can continue with the old age practices and technologies and still charge heavily. Therefore it becomes imperative for hospitals to adopt the latest trends in terms of technology and acumen in order to retain customer loyalty For Better Patient care: Hospitals were not few and far between in the olden days. Hence the patients yielded to the demands of hospitals every time even if it meant lesser quality of

treatment for the charges because they had no other choice. The rate of hospital expansion is alarming. They have mushroomed every where. Patients are no more at the mercy of doctors but it is vice versa. When a patient is not satisfied he/ she will not visit the hospital anymore. When it comes to treatment there should not be more than minor discrepancies among hospitals that are off at the same standards. One parameter for measuring the quality of treatment is the technology involved in offering it. This technology not only creates a level of comfort but also helps the patient to be confident that he is receiving the best treatment. To reduce operational costs: Enterprise resource planning helps to bring down the cost of operations. Based on the requirements the hospitals can go for best of breed or enterprise applications. This is an important step that helps hospitals to decide the appropriate Healthcare ERP or Hospital Management ERP.

AN EXAPMLE IN SUPPORT OF SUCCESSFUL ERP IMPLIMENTATION IN HEALTH CARE:

ORGANIZATION NAME: Medicin Farmaceutica, Honduras, Central America

Medical products supplier makes use of HansaWorld's mobile technology to receive easy access to their business information. Medicin Farmacutica is one of Hondurass main suppliers of health care products. The company supplies large cities as Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and Ceiba; while at the same time representing international trademarks such as Medpharma, Alfer, Select pharma and Kimberly. The New Challenges of This ORG.: The company has seen its volume of orders increasing and has been looking for a system to efficiently match that growth and raise the quality of service provided to the customers. Another important expectation to the new system was to provide accurate information about the market tendencies, such as sales statistics per region, city, sales person, product line etc. Resolution: Medicin Farmaceutica uses a Windows 2003 Server and the HansaWorld database for their implementation of Enterprise by HansaWorld. All mobile users - sales people and medical sales representatives - log into the main company by using Nokia 9300 business phones with GPRS technology.

Benefits and the Implementation Process*

Better control: Medicin now has better control over the stock, booking all the costs related to purchases and sales transactions. This information can be used for daily reporting, instead of the monthly reporting they used to have. Easy remote access. The administrative personnel and employees from Medicin can take requests and sales orders simply by using cell phones with the HansaWorld application installed. The sales team can now enter Sales Orders directly by using their cell phones, connecting to the server and having access to updated data, thus making paper-based ordering obsolete. Reduced waiting times. The company was expecting to dramatically reduce waiting times. With Enterprise, Medicin has control over its processes and can get accurate reporting immediately. Integrated customer information. The customer service department has been reorganized. With the aid of HansaWorld's Customer Relationship Management functionality, the company has an updated customer database that keeps all the information integrated with the rest of the system. One of the new implemented routines includes registering Activities, specifying the time every delivery is made. Easier delegation of tasks. The organization of work has always been important for Medicin. The company supplies medical products to different cities inside the territory; and with up-to-date and precise information, the delegation of specific tasks to each person has been made easier. Sound financial reporting. The final objective of providing the accountancy department with the correct administrative information in order to have financial reports without the need of external advisory has been achieved. Decrease of manual work. Medicin's suppliers provide them with special promotions per products sold, which results on free products for the final customers. Before the implementation it was necessary to register this situation in two different invoices; with Enterprise the transaction is registered in only one invoice with 100% discount. The implementation began on November 7th of 2006 and by January 2007 the system was already live. Now all the executive personnel inside Honduras log in to the system to enter and check the orders status online, connecting directly with the database in Tegucigalpa.

Future Expectations: In the near future Medicin Farmacutica will implement the E-commerce module, taking care of issuing Sales and Purchase Orders and answering status questions through the web. On the other side, the analysis of the data will be integrated with a Business Intelligence tool, for more precise ad hoc data reporting.