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by Alan Alper, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2005 4:32:00 PM   | Abstract: | Sure enterprise software suites such as SAP promise incredible operational intelligence and organizational efficiencies -- but not unless your users can quickly find, retrieve and respond to time-sensitive, business-critical data. |
Manufacturers adopting SAP America software -- or almost any enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite for that matter -- are guaranteed a couple of things: a fairly extensive and resource-intensive implementation and, once completed, more data than they know what to do with. Sure ERP suites can help them achieve enterprise-wide application integration, built around emerging Web services standards, and apply so-called "adaptive business processes" that yield greater operational intelligence and boost functional productivity. But unless manufacturers can manage the data onslaught that often ensues, they may not be able to leverage the organizational efficiencies critical to cost-justifying expensive ERP projects in the first place. A critical aspect to achieving corporate ERP objectives is having a solid foundation for storing, accessing and archiving important enterprise data. That means creating a data management hierarchy built along the parameters of business criticality, time sensitivity and media cost. Without such rigor, ERP applications performance can seriously degrade as users sort through reams of structured and unstructured data to find, retrieve and act upon time-sensitive, business-critical information. [Click to continue] |