Saturday, June 7, 2008





Business software is generally any software program that helps a business increase productivity or measure their productivity. The term covers a large variation of uses within the business environment, and can be categorized by using a small, medium and large matrix., The small business market generally consists of home accounting software, and office suites such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. The medium size, or SME, has a broader range of software applications, ranging from accounting, groupware, customer relationship management, human resources software, loan origination software, shopping cart software, field service software, and other productivity enhancing applications. The last segment covers enterprise level software applications, such as those in the fields of enterprise resource planning, enterprise content management , business process management and product lifecycle management. These applications are extensive in scope, and often come with modules that either add native functions, or incorporate the functionality of third party software programs. Now, technologies that have previously only existed in peer to peer software applications, like Kazaa and Napster, are starting to feature within business applications. JXTA is an open source platform that enables the creation of machine and language neutral applications. Peer based applications will be especially useful for aggregating the information at the edge of the network that currently resides in the neurons of the users themselves.


This monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected. In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed, how many orders were processed in the last month etc.. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity. The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring extend and expand the monitoring tools in BPMS. Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an 'a priori' process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.

Enterprise Content Management is any of the strategies and technologies employed in the information technology industry for managing the capture, storage, security, revision control, retrieval, distribution, preservation and destruction of documents and content. ECM especially concerns content imported into or generated from within an organization in the course of its operation, and includes the control of access to this content from outside of the organizations processes. ECM systems are designed to manage both structured and unstructured content, so that an organization, such as a business or governmental agency, can more effectively meet business goals , serve its customers as a competitive advantage, or to improve responsiveness, and protect itself against non compliance, law suits, uncoordinated departments or turnover within the organization. In a large enterprise, ECM is not regarded as an optional expense, where it is essential to content preservation and re usability, and to the control of access to content whereas, very small organizations may find their needs temporarily met by carefully managed shared folders and a wiki, for example. Recent trends in business and government indicate that ECM is becoming a core investment for organizations of all sizes, more immediately tied to organizational goals than in the past increasingly more central to what an enterprise does, and how it accomplishes its mission. The official definition of enterprise content management was created by AIIM international, the worldwide association for enterprise content management in the year 2000. The abbreviation ECM has been reinterpreted and redefined .

Enterprise Resource Planning systems integrate all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules. MRP vs. ERP Manufacturing management systems have evolved in stages over the past 30 years from a simple means of calculating materials requirements to the automation of an entire enterprise. Around 1980, over frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP to evolve into a new concept Manufacturing Resource Planning and finally the generic concept Enterprise Resource Planning MRP vs. ERP Manufacturing management systems have evolved in stages over the past 30 years from a simple means of calculating materials requirements to the automation of an entire enterprise. Around 1980, over frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP to evolve into a new concept Manufacturing Resource Planning and finally the generic concept Enterprise Resource Planning. The term ERP originally implied systems designed to plan the use of enterprise wide resources. Although the initialism ERP originated in the manufacturing environment, todays use of the term ERP systems has much broader scope. ERP systems typically attempt to cover all basic functions of an organization, regardless of the organizations business or charter. Businesses, non profit organizations, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and other large entities utilize ERP systems. Additionally, to be considered an ERP system, a software package generally would only need to provide functionality in a single package that would normally be covered by two or more systems. Technically, a software package that provides both payroll and accounting functions would be considered an ERP software package. However, the term is typically reserved for larger, more broadly based applications. The introduction of an ERP system to replace two or more independent applications eliminates the need for external interfaces previously required between systems, and provides additional benefits that range from standardization and lower maintenance to easier and or greater reporting capabilities . Examples of modules in an ERP which formerly would have been stand alone applications include Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, Customer Relationship Management , Human Resources, Warehouse Management and Decision Support System.