Emergence of ERPII Characteristics within an ERP integration context

It is widely accepted that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can provide organizations with efficiency and productivity gains, in terms of aggregating and streamlining internal business processes. It is also well understood that embarking upon the implementation of such an IT project, also presents many risks and challenges to the incumbent corporation, as witnessed by numerous cases in the normative IS literature on this subject. Through the description of a case study organization’s ERP integration experiences, the authors highlight the emergence of those characteristics which define the componentization, and extension of ERP functionalities (i.e. so-called ERPII) in terms of a failed ERP-led, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) implementation within an industrial products organization. As a result of the exploratory research approach used, it is hoped that the definition of such factors will provide an insight into the development and management of such technology investments

Development of high performance scientific components for interoperability of computing packages

Three major high performance quantum chemistry computational packages, NWChem, GAMESS and MPQC have been developed by different research efforts following different design patterns. The goal is to achieve interoperability among these packages by overcoming the challenges caused by the different communication patterns and software design of each of these packages. A chemistry algorithm is hard to develop as well as being a time consuming process; integration of large quantum chemistry packages will allow resource sharing and thus avoid reinvention of the wheel. Creating connections between these incompatible packages is the major motivation of the proposed work. This interoperability is achieved by bringing the benefits of Component Based Software Engineering through a plug-and-play component framework called Common Component Architecture (CCA). In this thesis, I present a strategy and process used for interfacing two widely used and important computational chemistry methodologies: Quantum Mechanics and Molecular Mechanics. To show the feasibility of the proposed approach the Tuning and Analysis Utility (TAU) has been coupled with NWChem code and its CCA components Results show that the overhead is negligible when compared to the ease and potential of organizing and coping with large-scale software applications

Tackling component interoperability in quantum chemistry software

The Common Component Architecture (CCA) offers an environment that allows scientific packages to dynamically interact with each other through components. Conceptually, a computation can be constructed with plugand- play components from any componentized scientific package; however, providing such plug-and-play components from scientific packages requires more than componentizing functions/subroutines of interest, especially for large-scale scientific packages with a long development history. In this paper, we present our efforts to construct components for the integral evaluation - a fundamental sub-problem of quantum chemistry computations - that conform to the CCA specification. The goal is to enable fine-grained interoperability between three quantum chemistry packages, GAMESS, NWChem, and MPQC, via CCA integral components. The structures of these packages are quite different and require different approaches to construct and exploit CCA components. We focus on one of the three packages, GAMESS, delineating the structure of the integral computation in GAMESS, followed by our approaches to its component development. Then we use GAMESS as the driver to interoperate with integral components from another package, MPQC, and discuss the possible solutions for interoperability problems along with preliminary results

Towards a novel framework for the assessment of enterprise application integration packages

In addressing enterprise integration problems, a diversity of technologies such as CORBA and XML were promoted, yet no single integration technology solves all integration problems. As a result, a new generation of software called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is emerging to addresses many integration problems by combining a diversity of integration technologies (e.g. message brokers, adapters, XML). Since EAI is a new research area, there is an absence of literature discussing issues like its adoption, evaluation and implementation. This paper, examines the application of two frameworks for the evaluation of EAI packages in the practical arena. In doing so, the authors use case study strategy to investigate integration issues. Empirical data derived from the case study suggest additions to the two evaluation frameworks. Therefore, the authors revised and extend previous works by proposing a novel evaluation framework for the assessment of EAI packages. The proposed framework makes novel contribution at two levels. First, at the conceptual level, as it incorporates criteria identified separately in previous studies as evaluation criteria. The proposed framework can be used as a decision-making tool and, supports management when taking decisions regarding the adoption of EAI. Additionally, it can be used by researchers to analyse and understand the capabilities o

ERP System Implementation At A Small Engineering Company: Size Does Matter

This case regards a company pseudonymously referred to as Johnson Precision Instruments, Inc, that, faced with Y2K compliance, decided to deal with it by adopting Oracle’s ERP solution, Oracle Applications. As recently as the mid to late nineteen eighties, traditional business applications comprising an organization's information infrastructure used data that either resided in proprietary file structures or was easily represented by the relational database model, in either event resulting in an ever proliferating set of non-integrated, heterogeneous systems.  In today’s business climate, access to information is key to competitive advantage, but both data and IT architectures have become increasingly complex, so a single system model is currently deemed desirable to reduce or eliminate the deleterious effects associated with the proliferation phenomenon.  This single system model (that would serendipitously solve as Johnson Precision Instruments,  Inc.'s  (JPII) Y2K problem as well) is typically embodied in the implementation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) process, but this solution carries it's own costs and risks as this case makes clear

Critical success factors in ERP implementation: A review

ERP systems have become vital strategic tools in today’s competitive business environment. This ongoing research study presents a review of recent research work in ERP systems. It attempts to identify the main benefits of ERP systems, the drawbacks and the critical success factors for implementation discussed in the relevant literature. The findings revealed that despite some organizations have faced challenges undertaking ERP implementations, many others have enjoyed the benefits that the systems have brought to the organizations. ERP system facilitates the smooth flow of common functional information and practices across the entire organization. In addition, it improves the performance of the supply chain and reduces the cycle times. However, without top management support, having appropriate business plan and vision, re-engineering business process, effective project management, user involvement and education and training, organizations can not embrace the full benefits of such complex system and the risk of failure might be at high level

A comprehensive review of the enterprise systems research

(WP 12/04 Clave pdf) Enterprise systems (ES) can be considered as a novel phenomenon for the information system research and other academic fields (e.g. operations and supply chain), which has opened an immense potential and opportunities for research. Although the interest of the scholars on ES is recent, the number of publications is continuously growing since 2000. The aim of this paper is to review a sample of important contributions of the ES works published to date. To do this, the selected works have been classified in four key topics: business implications, technical issues, managerial issues, and implementation issues.Enterprise systems, Research