Erp Report

As markets become more and more competitive, business environment is dramatically changing. Many companies face the challenge of expanding markets, increasing competition, and rising close connection with customers (Umble et al., 2003). However, the cost will increase by improving all this factors. In this way, companies try to seek new opportunities to enhance their competitiveness. As the business world moves ever closer to a completely collaborative model, at same time, competitors start moving towards e-business solution to remain competitive. Organisations must realise how important to strengthen their own business process and relationship with suppliers, distributors and customers. To accomplish these objectives, many organisations, therefore, utilise advanced information technology, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems have been rewarded as "the most important development in the corporate use of information technology in the 1990s"(Davenport, 1998, cited in Somers & Nelson, 2001).

The Bandon group is a family owned distributor of office equipment, also a leases company. Due to their good customer service, technical support and innovative products, Bandon group grew continuously through 1970s. Currently, Bandon group has four divisions (Portland, phoenix-corporate headquarters, Salt Lake City, Denvor) each division uses decentralised approach to meet needs of local markets. Corporate headquarters handles central administrations, information system support. Most administrative information systems are generic, only meter click billing software is unique. They selected office machines dealership (OMD) to deal with their outgrown legacy system and connect to divisions, but it was not built using a relational database, so ad hoc query and reporting is difficult. They required Pivotal as their sales prospecting tool, but it did not integrate with OMD. It causes duplicated data and data inconsistency. Additionally, different