ERP 5510 ERP System Administration

A case study of the Vinsun Engineering Companyis done regarding their dilemma of whether to set up an on-premise or cloud server ERP system.

Each aspect of the case has been thoroughly studied and recommendations based on the company’s advantages have been given.

Introduction

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the need of the hour for any organization in the modern days. Enterprise Resource Planning provides an integrated and a constantly updated view all core processes involved in a business, using database structures. It is maintained by a DBMS (Database Management System). This report aims to do a case study of the Vinsun’s need for ERP.

Company Background

Sunil Satav founded VINSUN in 2002. The Vinsun Infra Engineering had been providing electrification services in India for over a decade now. They have their market grasp over the telecommunication industries, commercial infrastructures, institutions and hospitals in providing electrification solutions. The company’s annual turnover had tripled over the past five years.

Case Details

Vinsun’s CIO, Kulkarni had proposed about the importance of embracing an ERP system into the company’s working module. As the company is growing in size and complex projects are being undertaken, maintaining local computer database to store data and information is also turning to be hectic. Furthermore, having multiple workstations across the country, the company presently relies on manual efforts to collate project information. Both Satav and Kulkarni believe that the inclusion of the ERP system shall solve all problems. In the hall meeting, Kulkarni explains in details, all benefits of the system. She explains how the inclusion of an ERP can help the company focus more on their core activities and get real time data at the same time. The ERP system will help to keep exclusive copies of data on the server and would also be easier to search from, using more efficient programs and methods. However, some employees feel that bringing in this change into the system, would create chaos and harm productivity. Nevertheless, the company CEO decides to go for the leap. Now his query is whether to opt for an On-Premise ERP or a cloud based ERP system. The CIO had already collected quotations from two different ERP Solution farms. The case study plans to provide recommendations about which path to chose.

Recommendations

After thorough study of the company’s case, it can be suggested that an On-Cloud ERP system would be highly beneficiary to them. Firstly, it is cheaper to setup, as the in-house network requirement cost is excluded, however the server maintenance in the long term might prove to be costly. That is considerable though, keeping in mind the benefits that cloud server beholds. Secondly, data can be stored and accessed from anywhere. Manual carriage of project data between workstations and headquarters will be abandoned. This would also prove to be a permanent solution for data loss. Data being saved on the cloud server will have their own back-up systems and shall be supervised by the service provider. The company will need not invest attention in its operation and hence concentrate on business. Whereas, in case of on-premise servers, it would be accessible only within the locally connected computers. This provides an obstacle in the barrier-less working concept that the company wishes to achieve. Cloud servers also prove to be faster when compared to standard dedicated servers.

However, to chose the proper service provider is also necessary. In this case, Bluechip Corporation and Codeautomations are the contenders. Provided that the CEO wishes to provide 2-3% of the annual budget into IT upgradations, and Codeautomations on-cloud ERP service is well within the company’s financial reach, this option is preferable in all terms.Satav and the CIO need to endow trust on the service providers regarding both their working stature and their ability to maintain data privacy. Specific tech-savvy employees must be identified within the organization and given proper training to handle the database from the local computers.

Conclusion

The case study of Vinsun’s situation in installing an ERP system depicts every important aspect of it. The study also helps in concluding that on-cloud ERP servers are more preferable for enterprise uses than on-premise database.

References

Avram Maricela-Georgiana. "Advantages and challenges of adopting cloud computing from an enterprise perspective." Procedia Technology 12 (2014): 529-534.

RelichMarcin. "Knowledge acquisition for new product development with the use of an ERP database." In Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS), 2013 Federated Conference on, pp. 1285-1290. IEEE, 2013.

RenKui, Cong Wang, and Qian Wang. "Security challenges for the public cloud." IEEE Internet Computing 16, no. 1 (2012): 69-73.

'Vinsun Infra Engineering Pvt. Ltd.' (Vinsunengineering.com, 2017) <http://www.vinsunengineering.com/#!/about_us> accessed 8 November 2017