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Table of Contents

1.0       Introduction.. 2

2.0       Role of ERP on Deverell Smith Business Model 3

3.0       Organization Structure of Deverell Smith.. 5

4.0       Configuration and Master Data of Materials Management Module of Deverell Smith   8

5.0       Procure to Pay Business Process Simulation for Deverell Smith.. 10

6.0       The role of ERP in Business Intelligence and Business Analytics Reports. 12

7.0       Conclusion.. 14

List of References. 15

Introduction

The company under consideration is in this paper is Deverell Smith. Started in 2006 and offering recruitment consultancy, Deverell Smith is among the leading UK’s real estate recruitment and executive companies (Best Companies 2019). The company partners with a number of world’s leading property-associated companies or businesses. The London based company believes in doing this in a different way with the ultimate goal of being the recruiter for choice for the world’s property businesses. This paper, therefore, discusses how Deverell Smith employs Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) by taking into consideration the company’s organizational structure, business intelligence, and other factors that enhance its functionality and operations.

Role of ERP on Deverell Smith Business Model

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) refers to a commercial process management software that is employed by an organization to manage the organization’s office and automate its business functions (Harmon 2014). ERP betters an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in various ways. First, it integrates the organization’s financial information. Without an integrated system, departments like sales, and finance, need to depend upon separate systems, each one of which will probably have various expense and revenue numbers. Employees at an organization’s levels end up wasting a lot of time reconciling numbers as opposed to discussing how to better the enterprise (Boudreau and Robe 2005). Second is the integration of orders. ERP functions by coordinating order taking, inventor, manufacturing, distribution, and accounting. This is comparatively less error susceptible and simpler with a single system rather that with a chain of separate systems for each and every step within the process (Sherman 2014). Third is provision of insights from customer information. Most ERPs have customer relationship management (CRM) apparatuses for purposes of tracking all customer exchanges. Harmon (2014) states that in addition to information regarding deliveries, orders, service requests, and returns, among other information, ERPs provide intuition regarding an organization’s customer needs and behaviours.

Additionally, ERP standardizes and speeds an organization’s manufacturing processes. Manufacturing firms often fins that several commercial units make alike widgets using dissimilar techniques and methods and computer systems. ERP helps in standardizing and automating manufacturing as well as supporting processes. Maciejczyk (2016) notes that this standardization increases productivity, saves time, and minimizes head count. Another role is to standardize an organization’s human resource information. An ERP enables workers to keep their individual information, while at the same time facilitating reporting, vacation requests, expense tracking, and training, among other activities. ERP also functions to standardize procurement and facilitates government reporting to ensure compliance with certain legal business needs. As such, an ERP betters the performance of an organization by improving an organization’s internal efficiency, bettering its decision-making, enhancing security, and increasing agility. 

Specifically, the ERPNext helps organizations of all sizes with several operational functions to maximize efficiency in their workplace. Through it, a company manages its accounting tasks, concerns related to project management, along with human resource duties in a single interface (Seethamraju and Sundar 2013). Additionally, it allows organizations to monitor their stock levels in real-time, thus making it easy to make sure that the organization’s inventory is well-ordered and equipped to back up the organization’s everyday operations (Ju et al. 2016). The cream of the capabilities of the software is its multi-currency back up system accounting feature. Generally, ERPNext functions to streamline, standardize, and integrate business processes across an organization’s human resource, finance, distribution, procurement, and other departments.  See the following screenshots for an overview of the use of ERP in an organization.

Organization Structure of Deverell Smith

Deverell Smith exhibits a functional kind of organizational structure. It divides up itself into departments comprising of sales, operations, human resource, finance, and sales, among other departments. The functional organizational structure has strengths and weaknesses. First, communication within the organization is fairly rigid since there is standard way of operating and a high level of formalization, which subsequently makes the process of decision making inflexible and slow (Rajan and Baral 2015). Additionally, since the structure is extra bureaucratic, the organization’s functional units may in most cases not be accountable to each other, and poor horizontal coordination in the departments may happen (Gazder and Khan 2018). Lack of innovativeness along with restricted views of the organization’s goals affects the organization’s workers’ motivation.

Conversely, the organization is characterized by specialization. People with alike skills and knowledge are grouped together and this makes it possible for the company’s workers to become specialists in their respective departments (Golembiewski 2015). Moreover, the structure allows for specialization that leads to operational efficiencies within the organization and betters the company’s productivity levels (Pugh et al. 2018). Owing to their skills and knowledge, employees within the company with specialized skills are able to perform duties quickly, efficiently, as well as with extra confidence, therefore minimizing the occurrence of job-related errors or mistakes (Goswami and Goswami 2010). Nonetheless, the cooperation level within the organization is often compromised since each department finds it difficult to work with another due to difference in their specialties (Vanhaverbeke & Torremans 2016).  For more information regarding the company’s organizational structure, see the screenshots below.

 Configuration and Master Data of Materials Management Module of Deverell Smith

The company has materials management (MM) module that functions to provide it with inventory, materials, and warehouse management abilities with the primary goal of making sure that the company’s materials are kept in proper qualities ad quantities and without gaps or shortages within the company’s supply chain (Miranda et al. 2016). Additionally, the MM module of the company is configured to help the company’s supply chain experts along with other employees to complete the buying of goods in a cost-effective and timely manner and to be capable of dealing with everyday changes in its processes. As such, the company’s configuration and master data of MM module integrates with components like sales and distribution, production planning, plant maintenance, finance and controlling, quality management, and human capital management.

Additionally, the configuration and master data of the company’s MM such that MM forms part of the company’s logistic functions and assists in managing the company’s procurement undertakings, supports all facets of the company’s MM, forms the backbone of the company’s logistics that incorporate like production planning, sales and distribution, plant maintenance, and warehouse management. The configuration and master data of the company’s MM works such that there is no time lag between information/data availability and data entry. Data integrity is maintained using two categories of data: master data (data that centrally created, and is useable for all applications) and transactional data (data that is linked to processing of the company’s commercial transaction).

Procure to Pay Business Process Simulation for Deverell Smith

A procure to pay (P2P) is employed in the company when the company wants to buy services or materials from an external supplier. The process, which starts from a purchase requisition (PR) and finishes with payment to the vendor, is determined by events like material requirement planning from the company’s warehouse management to make sure there is minimum tools quantities and material stock in its warehouse, firm maintenance tools, materials, external resources, service plans to buy, and other procurement requirements originating from the company’s various departments.

The principal steps during the company’s P2P, beginning with the purchase side, first is a requisition order, basically, an internal request to buy something, which begins the process of ordering during which time a purchase order (PO) is created. Next step involves receiving the good. During this second step, common documents that are created include order confirmation and advanced shipping notice. Lastly, there is the payment side. This side essentially entails creating an invoice, recording the transaction, and arranging on how to pay suppliers in the company’s accounting system.

While the above are the main steps, there are other minor steps that are employed by the company to accomplish its P2P processes. For instance, in some cases when the company’s procurement may need the employment of an authorized catalogue of goods or involve in request for quotation (RFQ) issuance. Managerial authentication is essentially needed at crucial decision points, like before the sending of a PO to a supplier or before the approval of a payment. There are also processes that are often employed to inspect the company’s received goods, acknowledging the goods acceptance, and entering the goods into the company’s inventory. See the following screenshots for an overview of the use of ERP in an organization for P2P processes:

The role of ERP in Business Intelligence and Business Analytics Reports

The ERP plays a number of roles in a company’s business intelligence (BI) and other business analytics. According to Gazder and Khan (2018), there are five categories of benefits of ERP in BI. Operationally, ERP minimizes an organization’s cycle time, reduces costs and improves the organization’s operational quality, productivity, and customer service). Managerially, ERP role plays in enhancing the process of decision making as well as planning within an organization, betters an organization’s resource management and performance. Strategically ERP helps in building a company’s external connections and cost leadership, supporting a business’ growth and development, generating product differentiation, supporting a business’ alliance, and building a company’s commercial innovations. Regarding information technology (IT) infrastructure, ERP minimizes IT cost, builds commercial flexibility for a company’s present and future change(s), and increases IT infrastructure capability. Lastly, organizationally, ERP transforms a company’s work patterns, empowers a company’s employees, facilitates organizational learning, and builds shared vision and goals among a company’s employees.

Similarly, Golembiewski (2015) defines three groups of benefits that arise to BI as a result of ERP. First are the tangible benefits that arise to a company after implementing an ERP. These include personal reduction, inventory reduction, order management betterment, knowhow cost minimization, procurement cost minimization, cash management betterment, profit/revenue improvement, logistics/transportation cost minimization, time delivery betterment, and maintenance cost reduction. Second are the intangible benefits realized by a company after implementing ERP. These benefits include improved or new business processes, cost reduction, standardization,  integration, customer responsiveness, flexibility, business performance, globalization, demand/supply chain, economic performance of a company, and visibility or information, monitoring cost, residual cost, bonding cost, information processing cost, documentation cost, communication cost, and opportunity costs associated with poor communication (Rajan and Baral 2015). Third are business performance factors like reduction of an organization’s commercial risks, enhancement of an organization’s regulatory compliance, making a company’s MIS extra accessible and accurate, and facilitating improved services by a company to its suppliers and customers. Additionally, ERP functions by allowing new services to a company’s suppliers and customers, enhancing primary users skills and knowledge of a company’s BI, increasing a company’s institutional accountability, increasing confidence in a company, enhancing support to the company’s organizational activities, enhancing an organization’s commercial performance, decreasing workload in a company’s various departments, and decreasing workload on a company’s central department (Goswami and Goswami 2010).

Similarly, a successful employment of ERP compels an organization to standardize, restructure, ad simplify their BI and general organizational functions (Gattiker and Goodhue 2005). Presently, several organizations employ BI to better their operational and technical processes, customer services, and supply chains (Ju et al. 2016). Pugh et al. (2018) add that BI systems are also employed for improving and changing an organizational processes, yet these changes or improvements cannot be realized without automated and transparent processes for which reason ERP is very instrumental with an organization’s BI. According to Gattiker and Goodhue (2005), a crucial feature of ERP integration is its ability to integrate data, for which reason once data enters once into an organization’s system can be used for all departments of the organization as well as its employees. Gaining access to all the collected information in a single data warehouse is among the crucial components of BI (Maciejczyk 2016). Data integration, according to Miranda et al. (2016), depends upon the IT infrastructure and ERP stresses upon the provision of this infrastructure. This integrator infrastructure can function to warrant al infrastructural and technical needs within a BI. See the following screenshots for an overview of the roles of ERP in BI.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ERP is important in an organization in a number of ways, especially when it is integrated with BI. It facilitates and informs decision making and improves operational efficiencies and effectiveness within a company. It also enables a company to efficiently and easily gather needful data in addition to streamlining and standardizing a company’s business processes. Along with other benefits, an integration of ERP and BI within a company gives a company to save costs and competitive advantage.