ERP
Coupa vs. SAP
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/03/20/coupa-raises-40m-for-cloud-procurement-software-takes-on-sap/
I had never actually heard of Coupa before I found this article from March of this year. Reading this, it seems like, if Coupa really is as all-encompassing as it sounds, there’s a great, untapped market just made for them. There are tons of companies that want total integration – or as close as they can get – but can’t afford the prices SAP wants to charge. Up to now, their only choice has been to cobble a bunch of different applications together to get functionality without inegration. Coupa provides an alternative to both SAP and “Frankenstein’s monster” as it says in the article.
Questions:
1) What are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing Coupa over SAP?
2) Does the newness of Coupa as an ERP make the option more or less attractive to prospective customers?
3) Does Coupa pose a serious threat to SAP’s market-share in your opinion?
ERP Comes to the Cloud and (Finally) Smaller Businesses
I wanted to try and find an article that discussed ERP as a service or “cloud” application that is also an affordable solution for small businesses. Whenever I think about ERP I think of larger companies, global corporations that have six, seven or even eight figure budgets. It seems that only recently it makes sense for a small or even medium size business to pursue an ERP solution.
Questions.
1.) At what point does it NOT make sense to implement an ERP solution?
2.) What are some of the advantages/disadvantages of a cloud ERP solution?
3.) How can a ERP solution provider make their cloud ERP solutions better for small business?
“Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges”
link: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2496725/enterprise-resource-planning/oracle-lands–100m-erp-project-covering-34-colleges.html
Hi class, I selected the article “Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges” because I wanted to apply ERPs to an institution that we are all familiar with since we are all students at Temple. Many universities suffer from the “silo approach” where information and communication in an organization isn’t fluid amongst different departments. This article highlights 34 Washington schools striving to break down these silos and ultimately increase efficiency at their university through implementation of Oracle’s next generation Fusion Application. Though this project’s implementation could result in great benefit for these universities; the article discusses numerous discrepancies that could make this project a poor investment as well. Oracle’s contract totaled 100 million dollars, however with a project so large; predictive analytics, budgeting, and establishing a legitimate time line for completion are all difficult to predict accurately. This investment could be successful as long as the universities’ needs are addressed by the system appropriately, and the risk associated with the project has been accounted for and mitigated as much as possible. Each of the proposed questions below applies to the article and is discussed in this week’s textbook chapter.
Questions:
1. From the college’s view, what is the risk associated with allocating immense financial resources and 5 years for this ERP system’s implementation?
2. Are these colleges more likely to adopt a “processes as a whole” type ERP system or a “single process” type ERP system? Why may this be the case?
3. Which business functions (supply chain management, human resources, customer relationship management.. ect.) will Oracle and these colleges hinge their ERP system on and why?