Strategic Information System Report: ERP for Business and Enterprises

This report examines the strategic information system needs of Gracious Industries, a company facing challenges in managing its business processes due to the absence of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The report identifies key business processes such as order processing, customer management, and report generation, highlighting the control risks associated with the lack of ERP. It outlines the business and system requirements for ERP implementation, focusing on features like integration, automation, and data analysis. The report further explores vendor selection by analyzing the functionalities of potential ERP vendors such as Oracle NETSUITE, SYSPRO, and Acumatica. The analysis aims to determine the most suitable ERP solution for Gracious Industries based on its specific needs and cost considerations, concluding with a recommendation for ERP implementation to improve efficiency and mitigate risks. The report emphasizes the benefits of ERP in reducing labor costs, improving data accuracy, and enhancing overall business performance.

Running head: STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM
Strategic Information System for Business and Enterprises
Name of Student
Name of University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to understand the importance of ERP in an organization. The
report discusses the problems faced by Gracious Industries in management of the
regular business processes, mainly due to lack of ERP. The Key business processes of
Gracious Industries involves processing of the orders, customers’ management and
generation of daily reports. Lack of ERP in the organization has increased the control
risks. Implementation of an ERP can help in effective management of the identified
risks. The report provides a brief understanding of the main features of ERP needed in
the organization. Services provided by various ERP vendors are analyzed to choose the
most suitable vendor for Gracious Industries.

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Table of Contents
Introduction/Background.........................................................................................3
1. Business Requirements......................................................................................3
1.1. Key Business Processes of Gracious Industries.........................................3
1.2. Major control Risks of the Company............................................................4
2. System Requirements........................................................................................5
2.1. Possible ERP features and functionalities that should be considered........5
3. Software Selection..............................................................................................7
3.1. Chosen ERP Vendors..................................................................................7
4. Vendor Selection................................................................................................8
4.1. Feature and Functionalities of ERP software package................................8
4.1.1. Oracle NETSUITE.................................................................................8
4.1.2. SYSPRO................................................................................................8
4.1.3. Acumatica..............................................................................................9
4.2. Suitable Vendor of ERP software................................................................9
Conclusion..............................................................................................................9
References............................................................................................................10

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Introduction/Background
The report considers the case study of Gracious Industry and discusses the need
of cloud computing in the organization. It is a small sized company with 35 employees.
However, the sales revenue of the company has been $10.5 million in the past.
Although the organization is a small sized organization, yet it has been in the business
for more than 40 years and is a supplier of electronic parts to different business
organizations. The growth of the company has been quite satisfactory in the last few
years mainly because of the new green product ranges. The flourishing in the business
has led to increase in complexity of certain key accounts. The company works on the
age old process of manual record keeping. An accountant is hired to manage the
financial records and the accountant produces the financial statement each year. The
company however, required more information for effective information tracking and
running the business and therefore and the need enterprise resource planning system is
proposed. The report outlines the main business requirements and the system
requirements for providing an ERP solution in the organization. The report considers
further research to identify the vendor suitable for Gracious Industries. The selection of
the vendor is based on the needs of the organization. However, the cost of the package
play a crucial role in selection of the software vendor. In this report 3 ERP vendors are
researched to check the suitability of each vendor for providing services to the Gracious
Industry. The packages offered by the each vendor will be evaluated to select the most
suitable vendor. The following paragraphs identifies the need of ERP in Gracious
industries and further identifies functionalities offered by two ERP software packages. At
first, the business requirements of the Gracious Industries are identified and discussed
in the following sections.
1. Business Requirements
This section of the report will be identifying the major business requirement of
implementation of ERP in Gracious Industries. In understanding the main requirements
of the Gracious Industries, the key business process of the Industry is discussed. The
lack of effective information system in the organization involves certain major risks in
the company. While analyzing the business requirements, the major risk that company
might face due to the lack of effective ERP policy will be discussed. This section will
address the need of ERP in a particular business as the implementation of the same
considerably reduces the labor cost and the major IT expenses in a company
(Mahendrawathi 2015). The need of ERP in Gracious Industries will be evaluated on
basis of the main business processes that runs within the Gracious Industries. Lack of
any automated business processes such as ERP, increases the control risks in the
business. The following two sections identify the key business process of the Gracious
Industry along with the major control risks that the company might face or currently
facing due to the lack of an effective ERP system.
1.1. Key Business Processes of Gracious Industries
The need of incorporating an ERP system in the Gracious Industry is subjected
to its business needs. For effective identification of the business needs for
implementation of ERP, it is crucial to identify the key business processes of Gracious

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Industries (Leon 2014). The Gracious Industry is a private limited company consisting of
35 employees. Gracious Industry includes a number of different businesses that include
hardware stores and supermarket. Thus, the key business process of this industry
include the management of the different sales process and management of the
transactions in the supermarket. The business processes of a supermarket
encompasses a series of tasks which include assortment of all the goods from different
suppliers, organization and distribution of the goods to the retail stores for selling it to
the local customers and processing of the orders of the customers (Azevedo, Romão
and Rebelo 2014). The main feature of the supermarket chain offered by the Gracious
Industry include offering a variety of products to their existing customers in an affordable
price.
The main business process of Gracious Industry include processing of the orders
and serving the customers of the supermarket. Along with that an effective control
process is needed to address the product requirements of the hardware store under the
Gracious Industry. As the company is expanding, it has become increasingly difficult for
the Gracious Industry to manage the sales processes or keep a track of the sales
processes (Chofreh, Goni and Klemes 2017). The major control risks that the gracious
Industry is currently facing due to a lack of an ERP system is discussed in the section
following.
1.2. Major control Risks of the Company
ERP is needed in a company as it helps in a significant improvement in the
internal business process of an organization. The lack of ERP in Gracious industry
leads to increase in the control risks in both its supermarket and hardware stores.
The main problem or risk that has been identified in this case involves lack of
effective control on the financial aspect of the business. Although the Gracious Industry
has hired an accountant for keeping a track of the financial inclusion of the business
and generates financial statement each year. However, this is not sufficient to address
the needs of the expanding business of Gracious Industries (Tarhini et al. 2015). The
annual financial statement that is generated by the accountant in a manual process is
full of errors and the information content in those reports are quite limited. The lack of
effective cost control method is leading to increase in the financial risks of the project.
The profit measures are ineffective as the company lacks generation of regular report
leading to the increase in control risks. The main control risks that the company is facing
due to the lack of ERP system in the organization are indicated as follows (Seethamraju
2015)-
1. Risk of improper financial estimation and profit estimation
2. Ineffective tracking of the inventory products
3. Risk of ineffective sales tracking
4. Risk of ineffective customer relationship management

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The above risks or uncertainties are linked with normal business process of
Gracious Industries. These risks can act as a roadblock to further expansion of the
company.
Thus, majority of the small, medium and large sized business organization prefer
the implementation of ERP particularly because it provides the necessary improvement
in the internal business processes of an organization along with the improvement in the
overall business performance (Al-Shardan and Ziani 2015). The implementation of ERP
in an organization can help in improving the business processes thus improving the
overall business performance as well. One key benefit that Gracious Industries could
realize with the implementation of ERP, is reduced labor cost, reduction in major IT
expenses and also improvement of the interaction between the staffs and the
companies (Chofreh et al. 2014). ERP can also help in ensuring effective business
processes that ensures that a business is provided with the data that is needed for its
effective implementation. The main concern linked with the financial report generated by
the appointed accountant of the Gracious Industries is that the information generated by
the accountant through manual process is prone to human errors. Presence of an ERP
solution greatly reduces the need of manually entering the information by streamlining
the most significant business processes, which in turn makes the process of data
collection even more efficient (Chofreh, Goni and Klemeš 2018). A functional ERP is
capable of effective warehouse management, management of customer relationship,
processing of the sales and management of the human resources as well. Thus,
implementation of ERP system can be advantageous for the Gracious Industries.
2. System Requirements
Implementation ERP system is one of the main requirements of the Gracious
Industries. Implementation of ERP in Gracious Industries can provide a facility and
benefit of working with a centralized system. The implementation of ERP further helps in
elimination of duplication of the data, discontinuity in data and data redundancy. One of
the main system requirements of the Gracious Industries include increase in the
productivity, improvement in the management of the inventory and promoting the quality
of the business. ERP can be of various types and the implementation of the ERP is
completely dependent on the business requirements of the organization (Tian and Xu
2015). Since Gracious Industries is a small sized company, implementation of any
complex ERP functionality might not be needed. The possible ERP features and the
functionalities that are needed to be considered for implementation of ERP in Gracious
Industries are discussed in the following section.
2.1. Possible ERP features and functionalities that should be considered
The possible ERP features and the functionalities that can be included in the
Gracious Industries are indicated in the following paragraphs-
Integration is one of the main functionalities of the ERP system that should be
considered for implementation of ERP in Gracious Industries. Integration is considered
to be one of the most important function and feature of ERP and is mostly included in
almost all ERP software systems (Shen, Chen and Wang 2016). This functionality of

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ERP will help the Gracious Industries to integrate and manage both their supermarket
business and hardware store in an effective manner (Al-Dhaafri, Yusoff and Al-Swidi
2014). The ERP system will help Gracious Industries in providing a fully integrated
platform that can enable the managers in analyzing, monitoring and conducting most of
the data driven task, which would have otherwise not possible.
Automation of the business process is another effective feature of ERP that
Gracious Industries can make use of in their existing business process. Implementation
of ERP automates the most common and the tedious task that include entry of the
payroll, accounting and reporting (Kurbel 2016). These tasks are some of the crucial
tasks that Gracious Industries faces while execution of their business processes.
Automation is one of the most effective features of ERP particularly because it can
simplify the tedious tasks and thus cutting down the work hours of the staffs of the
organization. Automation generally allows transfer of data from one part of the system
to other in an effective manner thus allowing the chances of error ( Sedera et al. 2016).
This is therefore one of the most significant needs of Gracious Industries as the
organization is currently facing issues due to ineffective record keeping. Automation will
help the managers in producing daily records related to the sales transactions of the
organization and will further helps in complete elimination of the errors in the business
process of the organization.
Data Analysis is another crucial feature offered by modern ERP solutions. ERP
systems are quite effective in automatic collection and analysis of the business data
thus forecasting the profit margin of the business (Kumar 2016). It is capable of
analyzing all the major data related to the most significant business operations such as,
data of the client, the statistics related to the production of the company, sales and even
the details related to the HR management of the organization (Ha and Ahn 2014).
Therefore, the functionality of data analysis as offered by the ERP solution can provide
Gracious Industries with an easy access to the most vital business data of the
organization.
Reporting is another feature of ERP that can help the Gracious Industries to
improve their business processes. The reporting functionality of the ERP helps in
effective conveying of the results of the analysis to the end users, in this case the
managers of the company (López and Salmeron 2014). The customizable dashboard of
majority of the ERP software can help Gracious Industries in getting an idea of their
business requirements at a glance. Thus, use of ERP can help Gracious Industries with
easier report generation which can be used for easier tracking of sales of the
organization.
Customer Relationship Management is considered to be one of the most
efficient functionalities of an ERP system. This feature is mainly present in the ERP of
the companies whose customer base have become way too large for the spreadsheets.
This is exactly the case of Gracious Industries and therefore, customer relationship
management can be considered as one of the key features that the ERP system of
Gracious Industries should consider (Wanare and Mudiraj 2014.). The CRM, apart from
handling the customers are capable of handling the marketing automation and sales of
the pipeline activities as well. This feature of CRM in ERP helps in improving the long

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term retention of the customers (Costa et al. 2016). Since the Gracious Industries is
currently expanding its business operations, one of the most effective business needs of
the organization is to keep the customers of the organization satisfied. Thus, CRM is
one of the most effective features that can be considered for the ERP system of
Gracious Industries.
Accounting is an important function of a particular business. Majority of the ERP
systems of an organization generally contains strong accounting tools that helps in
management of the key processes such as accounts payable, management of fixed
asset and management of the tax in an organization (Saade and Nijher 2016). This
feature of ERP is mostly needed in the Gracious Industries as various problems related
to accounting has been observed in the organization due to manual record keeping.
Majority of the ERP platforms generally provides and exceptionally strong tools for
managing the different aspects of sales and the profits of a particular business ( Orougi
2015). With the expansion of the business of Gracious Industries, an ERP with the
feature of accounting has become an important need.
Tracking and Visibility is another prominent aspect of ERP solution. ERP
provides supply chain visibility that allows the users to understand the delays and stock
outages (Bahssas, AlBar and Hoque 2015). This feature might be a great help for
Gracious Industries as it will help in enforcing a better visibility of the supply chain of
supermarkets and the hardware store under Gracious Industries. ERP allows efficient
tracking of the information, which is an important feature of the ERP.
The above discussed paragraphs indicates the features of ERP that should be
considered for the ERP system of Gracious Industries to minimize the risks (Jena
2014). However, depending on the budget of the company, few of the features can be
dropped. In the following section, the description of three vendors of ERP and the
products offered by them is considered.
3. Software Selection
On analysis of the features of the ERP system that should be considered for the
Gracious Industries, it is necessary to make a correct choice of ERP vendors who can
provide all the required features of ERP in an affordable price. The details of the three
vendor that are researched in this case are indicated in the section below.
3.1. Chosen ERP Vendors
Services provided by three ERP vendors are researched to choose a vendor who
would be suitable for providing services to Gracious Industries. The details of each of
the vendors are indicated as follows-
Oracle NETSUITE: The first ERP vendor that is researched is NETSUITE. This
provider has a deep understanding of the wholesale distribution business and provide
effective cloud ERP solutions. Some of the features of the cloud ERP solution as
offered by NETSUITE include continuous engagement with customer, full visibility of the
work processes, pre-built report and real time report generation and increasing
efficiency (Netsuite.com. 2019). The NETSUITE provides customized ERP solution that

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helps businesses to optimize the different practices of the organization. NETSUITE
allows the business organizations to manage all their business processes in a single
system.
SYSPRO: This is another ERP vendor that is researched. This vendor mainly
specializes in providing effective ERP solutions to the mid-size business organizations,
which encompasses the various aspects of a business (Syspro.com 2019). The features
of the ERP provided by this cloud vendor include a web based UI for universal access
and the ERP service offered by this vendor can be accessed through all devices which
enable a 24*7 access. It provides an industry specific cloud solution that is mainly
designed for simplifying the main complexity and add significant value to the main
distributers and manufacturers (Romero and Vernadat 2016). Furthermore, it offers the
client, the much needed flexibility to choose the deployment process that suits the
needs of the business.
Acumatica is an ERP provider that is a developer of a cloud and browser based
ERP system. The company was founded in the year 2008 and is one of the fastest
growing cloud provider for small and medium sized business (Acumatica Cloud ERP
2019). It provides seamless integration of all the processes of a business organization
which will be effective for the business of Gracious Industries.
The above paragraphs provide a brief idea of three ERP vendors and the main
features of the ERP services provided by those vendors. In the following section, the
most suitable vendors are chosen of Gracious Industries.
4. Vendor Selection
This section of the report will be analyzing the three vendors identified in the
above section, on basis of the feature and the main functionalities of the ERP software
packages offered by those vendors.
4.1. Feature and Functionalities of ERP software package
The packages and the services offered by NetSuite, SYSPRO and Acumatica
are analyzed in the following section to identify the most appropriate cloud vendor for
Gracious Industries.
4.1.1. Oracle NETSUITE
Two software packages offered by oracle NETSUITE include Financial
Management package and supply chain and inventory management package.
The financial management package offers effective planning and budgeting,
proper order management, production management along with warehouse fulfillment
(Netsuite.com. 2019). The supply chain management looks after the entire supply chain,
manages orders and produces reports.
However, NETSUITE provides the facility of customization of the ERP packages
as per the needs of any organization.

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4.1.2. SYSPRO
The two features of the ERP packages offered by SYSPRO include cost
management and supply chain management. The cost management feature of the ERP
helps in reduction of the sales and the service by keeping a track of the regular
expenditure. It therefore helps in integration of all the major business processes of the
company.
The supply chain optimization feature offered by the SYSPRO ERP also helps in
minimization of the overall cost, reducing the risk of ineffective management of the
overall operations of a particular organization Syspro.com 2019. SYSPRO offers the
benefit of customization of the ERP packages as per the needs of the organization.
4.1.3. Acumatica
The two ERP packages chosen include Financial Management solution and
Project accounting. The Financial management solution keeps a track of all the sales
processes of the origination and generates regular reports on basis of the same
(Acumatica Cloud ERP 2019). The project accounting solution works for tacking the
main business processes and helps in generation of the regular reports. Acumatica
further provides the facility of customization of the packages which are linked with the
needs of the organization.
4.2. Suitable Vendor of ERP software
The ERP vendor that is chosen to be appropriate for the Gracious Industries, is
SYSPRO. SYSPRO is chosen as it provides an industry built ERP software that
ascertains success of an organization. It has separate packages for small and medium
sized industries. Gracious Industry is a small sized organization and therefore can
consider the packages offered by SYSPRO. Furthermore, Gracious Industries can opt
for the customized solution offered by SYSPRO. The customized ERP solution can help
the Gracious Industries in incorporation of the identified features in the ERP solution.
SYSPRO has customized packages for the small and medium sized organization thus
offering a cost effective solution (Gelogo and Kim 2014). Thus, the choice of SYSPRO
vendor for implantation of ERP in Gracious Industries is justified.
Conclusion
The report has evaluated various functionalities and features of an ERP system.
The report has taken into consideration the business processes of Gracious Industries
and has evaluated the need of incorporation of ERP in the business processes of the
organization. The report has identified the key business processes of Gracious Industry
and has further identified the major control risks that the company is facing due to a lack
of ERP solution. The system requirements linked with the organization has been
identified to understand the main features that the ERP of Gracious Industries needs to
possess. It is observed that Gracious Industries is mainly concerned about the financing
process followed in the organization. The manual record keeping of the financial data of
the organization increases the business risks. On identification of the features that are
needed to be incorporated in the ERP of the organization, three cloud vendors are

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researched to choose the most suitable vendor. The ERP for Gracious Industries needs
to possess the features of effective financing, report generation, integration, automation
and management of customers. On analysis of the cloud vendors, it is observed that all
the three cloud vendors offers those functionalities. Out of the three cloud vendors,
SYSPRO us chosen as this vendor is known to provide cost effective ERP solutions to
small and medium sized organization. A customized ERP package can be chosen by
Gracious Industries as per the needs of the organization.
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