Identifying Business Needs and Recommending Software Solution

Discuss About The Organization To Enhance Its Competitiveness?

Technology has become an integral part of different organisations across the globe for their different purposes. They have viewed this as a resourced to enhance their competitiveness and enhance their business. However, it is indeed difficult to identify the needs for an organisation in order to enhance its competitiveness. It is indeed much difficult to identify the exact solution to the identified needs. Both things are challenging (Chen, Chiang and Storey 2012). The main purpose of this assignment is to identify the business needs for the selected organisation. Moreover, the assignment recommends a software solution to the identified business needs. Additionally, the assignment covers in detail the identification and selection of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as a solution to the business needs for the selected company.

Hunter Valley Buses is a public transport company in the New South Wales of Australia. It came into existence in the year 1926. Its major operations include commuter bus, coach, school bus and charter services. The company has seen ups and down in its long career ever since its inception. However, it appears that it has failed in analysing the potentialities hidden in the public transport business. Additionally, it has also suffered in customer service. They have no idea whatsoever about the technology, which could bring differences in between the company and the others operating in the same segment of market.

Technology has become a solution to many problems in the contemporary business world. Companies are putting their ample of investments on the Research & Development (R&D) process. This is because they are aware that R&D is the one sector, which makes a high difference in between the different companies. For example, the production of Tata Nano is a good example of technology use. Tata has used technology at the utmost level to bring in the differences in the market. The segment of the market, which Tata has targeted, has never been thought before. It was indeed a bold decision to bring in market something, which is cheaper but low in quality (Singh and Srivastava 2012). Apart from making investments on the R&D process, it is also important to invest on some software that is a potential option for the improvement of customer service and enhancement of revenues. One of such software is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which is highly effective in enhancing the customer service standard and the revenues (Zaitar and Ouzarf 2012). The selected company is operating in the public transport industry. The industry has potentials in it; however, it has not yet entirely improvised it. This may be because of several reasons; however, lack of acquaintance with the useful software is one of the reasons, which restricted it to a limited business scope.

Benefits of ERP Implementation for Hunter Valley Buses

The company has diversified business; however, it needs a support of an external force that could enhance their capability in database management and the customer service standard (Monk and Wagner 2012). Such tasks are never possible with the manual style of working. These are even not feasible with any other modes to their known. However, these are feasible with the implementation of ERP in the company but the cost of purchasing is the one constraint that could test their decision-making.

To manage the database and to enhance the customer service standard, it is imperative to take help from a software technology that could efficiently serve the needs of the system. In this regard, ERP is one of the best options though it is expensive but its usefulness is much more important than this. The database management is of utmost need for the Hunter Valley Buses. This is because of many reasons such as keeping the records of transactions with clients, services provided till the date and improvisation of the available opportunities. These are few business areas that help a company in successfully countering the competitors. However, the system requirements that have been felt needs to be supported with an utmost application of the ERP system.

Selecting an appropriate software or vendor is even tougher than just identifying the business needs. This is because of many following reasons:

• Varied range of software in the market: There are some other options other than the ERP. Those options are such as Oracle RDBMS, IBM DB2, MySQL etc. However, all those software are even costlier than the ERP (Moniruzzaman and Hossain 2013). Additionally, all such software are specifically designed to data base management; however, the selected company also needs solutions for the customer service. They are operating in public. It is then very important that they have high customer service standard. It is indeed challenging to identify the resource that could provide the required external supports.
• Budget constraints: This is another factor, which plays a significant role in selecting the required software support for the operation. It is indeed very important to select the most appropriate software solution for the company. It costs certain amount for purchasing the required software, which is why it is important that companies make wiser decision in order to prevent any financial loss. This can be the case that inappropriate software has been purchased, which is both expensive and useless to the purpose of the respective company. It is now clear that budget is a constraint because of two reasons such as inappropriate selection of software that might attract investments for no purpose and purchasing costlier software, which is a constraint to many SMEs (Adzic 2012).

For the selected company Hunter Valley Buses, ERP would be the best selection as it is both purposeful and affordable for a company, which is operating for quite a few decades.

Three ways in which ERP can benefit the selected organisation in enhancing its service standard and the productivity:

1. Just in Time Delivery: This is indeed of much use in the manufacturing business where manufacturing might hamper under the influence of a poor tracking of the requirements, availability of raw materials and the available resources. Nevertheless, this is also useful in case of the selected organisation. The selected organisation operates in the different public transport related services. It is therefore very important that the company deliver the service in time. For that, it needs to have a system that could maintain a healthy information flow such as the booked orders, scheduled transactions etc. Nonetheless, ERP provides solutions to all such requirements. It manages the flow of information and let the operator know about the scheduled transactions. This means that the company would know have a very robust system to counter the challenge of rising demands for public service (O’Grady 2012).
2. Enhanced employee’s productivity and customer satisfaction: The implementation of ERP in the system would enhance the productivity of employees, which at one stage looks like as vanished. In the contemporary workplace, there are different generation that works together; however, they have high differences in them as well (Chou 2012). Millennials in particular are very technology oriented. They want creativity at the workplace. Working with the ERP requires creative works as well. Henceforth, ERP solution would enhance the interest level of employees. Additionally, this would also do many such tasks, which was earlier needed to be done manually. Such system would prevent from errors, which was very susceptible with the manual style of working. An error free work is a very good resource to customer satisfaction (Jahanshani et al. 2014). This is not true that there would not be any errors from now onwards; however, the rate of occurrence would reduce to a much lower level. The generation report would be freer from errors, which in other way would enhance the customer service standard of the Hunter Valley Company.
3. Identification of problems: ERP not only helps in capturing the data but it also has many other aspects as well. It has many other aspects like quality index and productivity. These two aspects help to identify the performance related gaps, which is very necessary to identify the errors. Identifying errors is also important because this protect from adverse customer reaction. An error full service would certainly attract criticism. The system not only guides to the errors present but it also provides information on the required measures, which would resolve any error present in the operation (Johnson et al. 2013).

The implementation of the ERP system would certainly enhance the service delivery capability of Hunter Company. They need more clients in order to enhance their business domain. The inclusion of more clients in the business would mean an added pressure, which would be challenging for the company. They might not be able to provide timely services to their different clients. However, with the help from ERP, they would be able to manage the database and use it according to their needs. The system would intimate the company with different information, which never had been possible with manual type of work. The intimation would help the company to deliver the service on the agreed time span. The system would also help in identifying any error in the service quality. This would ensure an enhanced customer service standard, which is never possible with manual works and increasing business. Employees working in the company would also add values to the production with the help of information flow in the system. They represent the company, which is why it is important that they deliver expected job. Nonetheless, the system would help the employees in delivering a calculated job based on the information available in the ERP system.

Evaluation Criteria for Measuring Efficiency of ERP

Evaluation of ERP can be done with the help of different set parameters. The Hunter Company has decided to purchase the ERP and implement it in the system in order to enhance its competitiveness and the customer service standard. To evaluate the efficiency of the ERP system, it is not necessary to concentrate on its features. It is rather more important to look on the objectives that has encouraged for purchasing the ERP. It is very clear that the performance of ERP can be evaluated with the help of preset evaluation criteria (Nizamani et al. 2014). Some of the criteria to check the efficiency of the implemented ERP system are as follows:

Customer Relationship Management: This is the utmost parameter, which is one of the reasons behind the proposed selection to implement the ERP in the company. The criteria for CRM would be many such as improved customer service, timely delivery of the services, effective customer feedbacks etc. For a bus company, it is important that the buses are in good condition and people like it for its inner facilities and comfort. Moreover, school students are happy with the buses. However, there is no such way to know their happiness and satisfaction than to have their valuable feedbacks on the same (Boud and Molloy 2013). To evaluate the efficiency of the ERP system, the company should ask for feedbacks from the customers and from the clients regarding everything inside the bus. There feedbacks would be saved in the database of ERP. Once it stores the data, it would then be the time to identify the appreciation and the escalations in terms of everything from customer service to the comfort inside the bus. If the ERP helps to communicate that there are certain escalations and there is a need to work on such escalations then this would be understood that the ERP is working at its capability. The fundamental facts behind this are the deliverance of awareness regarding the customer service, which is why it is being installed. Earlier, this was not possible because it was not feasible to deal with different segments on different parameters. ERP is the one application that provides a systematic platform where everything is stored in its database (Söderberg and Åberg 2015).

Big Data: This is another very important functionality of the ERP system. It is actually a resource to store big data, which is why it provides a sophisticated usage with numerous benefits. Without ERP, different data such as sales transactions, customer responses, customer complaints, big data storage was majorly not possible. There was hardly any system to store such data. Customer responses and the complaints had no such format where those all could be stored. However, ERP has provided a one platform for many requirements (Relich 2013). Big Data is one of those benefits, which includes the storage of important data as well as many other data. This is extremely large set of data. The evaluation of ERP in such case would be done by checking the efficiency of the system in storing the major and other data. Moreover, the delivery of such data on an individual’s wish without any flaws would prove its worth in storing the data. There should not be any traffic, so that, the delivery is delayed (Bradford 2015).

Potential Security Risks and Data Breaches Associated with ERP

There are few potential security related risks and the data breaches issue of the ERP. Following are some risks that might hamper the performance of the system, which would also be the loss of investments on purchasing the system:

Risk 1: Outdated version: It is mandatory to check the version of the software or else this would even corrupt the entire system. This would hamper its integration with the servers. Moreover, this would hamper the communication and hence the performance of the system (Ng and Wang 2014).

Risk 2: Unauthorised access to developers: Software developers have their access to the coding region, which means they could intentionally change the functionality of the software. In such situation, software would not be in its original form. Henceforth, the performance would be hampered (Chang et al. 2014).

Risk 3: Delayed updates: This is perhaps a significant challenge with the ERP. This is because the vendors of ERP are very disconnected with the upgraded version. Other software are continually engaged in upgrading the version and improving the performance; however, the ERP vendors are not so attentive. They are very disconnected with the updates, which might hamper the business performance (Oseni et al. 2017).

ERP can have some security related issues as well. Few ERP systems are not compatible with the security enables credit card such as Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Fundamentally, the system cannot read such credit cards, which are non-heavily encrypted. Numbers with 3 or 4 digit are not compatible. Additionally, there are numerous other issues at the back end operation. There is a requirement to have a strong firewall set up in the system in order to protect it from getting accessed with unauthorised users (Khan, Ahamad and Samad 2017).

The first recommendation is to use the updated version of ERP. This would increase the efficiency of the system and hence would improve the outcome. The second recommendation is for restricting the access of the developers to the coding region. They should be strictly scrutinised for such activities and should be penalised as well once they are caught with the same. The third recommendation would be to train employees on operating the system. This would help the company gain knowledge on the system, which is very necessary to catch the unauthorised accessed to the system.

Conclusions

The Hunter Valley Buses needs to implement the ERP system in order to become specialised in many activities such as Big Data management, Customer Relationship Management, sales tracking, information flow and many more like such. This would help the company in enhancing its business even further. This would also help in enhancing its customer service standard. Database management could then be done at comparatively easier efforts. However, the company should also keep some important points related to the ERP system into their mind. They should check the version before purchasing the system. An updated version is only advisable for purchase in order to avoid any system conflicts. This can also affect the service quality. Additionally, company should conduct strict scrutiny over the access with the ERP system. The system can easily be decoded by the software developers. This is extremely harmful as this would start giving fault results. Henceforth, the customer service standard would then be hampered because the output performance would then be influenced. It is really advantageous for the use of ERP system; however, this would also welcome some challenges such as the data breaches. The company should entirely focus on the opportunities and grab this with their both hands while keeping a tight observation on the software developers.

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