Track: Engineering Management

Abstract

Companies face increasing competition due to factors such as globalization and rapid technological advancement. In order to remain competitive, organizations must adapt advanced manufacturing practices, improve operational efficiency and reduce process waste in the business process. Extracting key features and learning from business data are important parts of business process improvement. An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can assist management through the integration and automation of core business processes to improve the performance. However, current ERP systems are mostly unsuitable for small and medium enterprises (SME) industries as these are very expensive, demand lot of resources and require modifications to the business processes to fit the ERP modules.  Therefore, SMEs face distinct challenges which can be addressed by developing simple ERP systems. This study reports the design and implementation of an ERP system for ABC[1], a medium size a food processing company located in Queensland, Australia. The aim of this research is to develop a simple and easily usable ERP system to assist in the operations of ABC to improve operational efficiency, increase product quality and consequently customer satisfaction, as well as supporting decision making. Microsoft (MS) Access was used to develop the ERP programme, following a modular approach to facilitate planning and management activities of ABC via the integration of key functional units. The key functional units within the designated ERP framework include Sales, Procurement, Production, Quality Management and Finance. The key realized advantages of the developed ABC ERP system include: Ergonomic and intuitive ERPs, Enable integration between functional units, Ability to visualize data and generate reports, and Scalability and expansion via additional modules and records. This study demonstrates that simple, effective and user-friendly ERP systems are required to address the problems of SMEs