A Knowledge Transfer Partnership - the development of a Bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System in the UK

Abstract. A Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a UK-wide programme designed to enable businesses to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance. A KTP achieves this through the forming of a Partnership between a business and an academic institution. The aim is to enable businesses to access skills and expertise from academics and embed this knowledge in their businesses in order to develop the business. The knowledge sought is embedded into the business through a project, or projects, undertaken by a recently qualified person (known as the Associate). Part funding is provided by the government towards the Associate’s salary and towards the release of an Academic supervisor who works a half a day a week at the company. KTPs can vary in length from 6 months to three years, depending on the needs of the business and the desired outcomes. Therefore a KTP enables new capability to be embedded into the business and has benefited and continues to benefit a wide range of businesses across many sectors in the UK, including micro sized, small and large businesses across many sectors. This paper describes a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project between the University of Hertfordshire and a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK.Final Accepted Versio

The Design and Implementation of a bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) for an acoustical engineering company

This paper will describe the tasks completed so far as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Hertfordshire and Acoustical Control Engineers (ACE) a ‘small and medium sized enterprise’ (SME) based in Cambridgeshire, UK. ACE’s 25 personnel design, manufacture and install noise and vibration control systems to solve a wide range of acoustic problems. The projects undertaken include acoustic enclosures for supermarket refrigeration plant and for generators used in many situations, together with other more diverse applications such as controlling noise in the workplace and even on a luxury boat. Before the current KTP project the company used some partially computerised systems consisting of spreadsheets to perform acoustic analyses, pricing and project management functions supplemented with a paper based system to ‘fill the gaps’. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provide an integrated database for all parts of the organisation allowing decisions to be based on a complete understanding of the organisation’s information, avoiding the problems due to duplication of data and ensuring that the consequences of decisions in one part of the organisation are reflected in the planning and control systems of the rest of the organisation. ERP systems became popular from the 1990’s mainly in relatively large organisations due to the complexity and cost of these systems. This project is unusual in that rather than adapting an off-the-shelf ERP solution to ACE’s very specific and specialised requirements we are taking an ERP development approach in an SME whose legacy systems are made up of spreadsheet and paper based systems. For the software development an Agile approach has been used. Agile involves software development methods based on iterative and incremental development. The initial attempt was to start developing the ERP from an Open Source ERP Source Code; however this effort was futile as a result of the bespoke nature of ACE’s business and product lines. Mapping ACE’s data model to the database which any existing ERP system could be adapted to, proved to be a very difficult problem. Therefore, developing the ERP from first principles was inevitable. Several of the ERP modules have been developed, user training has taken place and the core modules have been signed off. The project is due to complete in September 2014 and by this time we will have further information on how the ERP system has increased the competitiveness of the company, as well as experience of introducing an ERP into an SME. However, as would be expected the work undertaken developing the system so far has had several significant effects on ACE and acted as a catalyst for change in various parts of ACE’s business.Non peer reviewe

Iterative criteria-based approach to engineering the requirements of software development methodologies

Software engineering endeavours are typically based on and governed by the requirements of the target software; requirements identification is therefore an integral part of software development methodologies. Similarly, engineering a software development methodology (SDM) involves the identification of the requirements of the target methodology. Methodology engineering approaches pay special attention to this issue; however, they make little use of existing methodologies as sources of insight into methodology requirements. The authors propose an iterative method for eliciting and specifying the requirements of a SDM using existing methodologies as supplementary resources. The method is performed as the analysis phase of a methodology engineering process aimed at the ultimate design and implementation of a target methodology. An initial set of requirements is first identified through analysing the characteristics of the development situation at hand and/or via delineating the general features desirable in the target methodology. These initial requirements are used as evaluation criteria; refined through iterative application to a select set of relevant methodologies. The finalised criteria highlight the qualities that the target methodology is expected to possess, and are therefore used as a basis for de. ning the final set of requirements. In an example, the authors demonstrate how the proposed elicitation process can be used for identifying the requirements of a general object-oriented SDM. Owing to its basis in knowledge gained from existing methodologies and practices, the proposed method can help methodology engineers produce a set of requirements that is not only more complete in span, but also more concrete and rigorous

Incorporating Agile with MDA Case Study: Online Polling System

Nowadays agile software development is used in greater extend but for small organizations only, whereas MDA is suitable for large organizations but yet not standardized. In this paper the pros and cons of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extreme programming have been discussed. As both of them have some limitations and cannot be used in both large scale and small scale organizations a new architecture has been proposed. In this model it is tried to opt the advantages and important values to overcome the limitations of both the software development procedures. In support to the proposed architecture the implementation of it on Online Polling System has been discussed and all the phases of software development have been explained.Comment: 14 pages,1 Figure,1 Tabl

Designing a consulting services architecture model

textDuring my years of experience in the technology industry, it has become obvious that standard processes and methodologies within the engineering discipline are at a mature state. The realization though is that software engineering specifically lags behind. Most software engineering methodologies that I have studied focus on the mission of software development. It is this realization and the need for structure that led me to review existing methodologies used within my company's software services organization. The definition of what a successful software services methodology entails is rather limited. This report will provide a history of existing software engineering methodologies that I have studied, describe an initial services method that was being developed within my organization, develop a new model that addresses previous shortcomings and identify additional components required to further define a strong software services-oriented delivery methodology.Electrical and Computer Engineerin