Enterprise Information Systems Definition

Reading a business-related documentation often can feel like trying to understand a foreign language. Between confusing specialized abbreviations, complicated technical names and other bits of information, it's natural for your eyes to glaze over after just a few seconds. Whether you're a prospective businessman looking to better understand the processes of your company, or a just a regular person trying to read new business paper, this educational guide will quickly put everything in order.

Information systems are divided into several categories, each of them occupies a niche in the production life cycle of the enterprise, performing the necessary functions.

Let's take a look at what these various terms mean.

• ERP
  (Enterprise Resource Planning) - System for planning (managing) enterprise resources.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) - interaction model, which is based on the assumption that the center of all business philosophy is the client and the main activities are effective marketing, sales and customer service.
• ECM (Enterprise Content Management) - a strategic infrastructure and technical architecture to support a single life cycle of unstructured data (content) of various types and formats. Primarily used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content.
• CPM (Corporate Performance Management) - corporate performance management concept, which covers the whole range of tasks in the area of strategic and financial administration of the company. It is the process of monitoring and managing an organization's performance, according to key performance indicators.
• HRM (Human Resource Management) - the field of knowledge and practices, aimed at ensuring the staff organization and its optimal use. HR is primarily concerned with the organization of people resources within companies.
• EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) - is an information system designed primarily for the automation of processes related to the maintenance of the equipment, its repair and after-sales service. It is the optimal life cycle management of the physical assets in organization.
• EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) - enterprise document management framework. It is a software complex based on computer programs used to track, manage and store documents. Usually has the client-server architecture.

Now, let's dive deeper into each of the mentioned above abbreviations:

ERP Systems

ERP-system can be used in several ways:

• To build an information infrastructure for the identification and planning of all resources of the organization (company).
• To create a methodology for effective planning and administration of all the resources in the institution that may be needed to grow sales, increase productivity of employees and improve the quality of service.

ERP-System example:

ERP-system automates the procedures, that create business processes. For example, customer order processing: getting order, invoicing, receiving payment, shipping from the warehouse and delivery to the client.

The software processes the client's order and serves as a guide to automate it's various steps. When the manager enters a customer order in the ERP-system, he has access to all the information necessary to complete the order. For example, he immediately gets access to the credit rating of the buyer and the history of his orders from the financial module, learns about availability of the product and shipment schedule from the logistics module.

Unlike EDMS-systems, in ERP documents are not created at the beginning of the life cycle, but at the end or after it. In other words, documents are created after approval, signing registration, etc. And the role of EDMS is to support such life cycle in the enterprise in real time.

CRM Systems

CRM-system - a concept of management active relationships with customers. It is a work organization system of the company with orientation to customer needs, a more active and fruitful work with the clients. CRM aims to improve the sales of goods (services), rather than increase production rates.

Listed below are the functionality that can be implemented in the CRM-systems:

• Sales
  • managing contacts
  • work with clients
  • customer orders processing
  • creating business applications
• Sales management
  • sales funnels analysis
  • sales cycle analysis
  • regional analysis
  • sales reports (planned and unplanned)
• Sales registration by phone (phone and personal communication with the client)
  • creation and distribution of the buyers list
  • schedule automatic calls to a buyer
  • call registration (automatically, if the registrar is available)
  • customer orders registration
• Organizer
  • Calendar and scheduling (for the group and for each individual user)
  • E-mail
• Customer service and support (users, clients)
  • customer inquiries registration
  • inquiries forwarding
  • orders movement within the company
  • orders reporting
  • inquiry information
  • management of warranty / post-warranty and commercial service
• Marketing
  • marketing campaigns
  • managing requests
  • classifier of goods and services that the company offers its customers
• Reports
  • for management staff
  • for middle managers
  • for everyone else
• ERP integration
  • receiving / sending data over the Internet
  • with external databases (DB)
  • Internet transactions
• Data synchronization
  • with mobile phones and portable devices
  • synchronization with other databases and application servers (within the company)

ECM Systems

ECM-system presents a basic infrastructure and technical architecture to support the life cycle of an unordered information (files) of various types and formats. ECM consist of applications that can interact with each other, as well as being used and sold as a separate products.

CPM Systems

CPM-system is a set of methodologies, industry models, metrics, processes for monitoring and managing performance of the institution. The idea of CPM is an extension of the concept of information-analytical complex, complementing the reporting and analysis functions with the consolidation, budgeting, strategic planning and forecasting.

HRM Systems

HRM-system is an automated integrated system of personnel management. Compared with other complexes that automate personnel administration, HRM offers enhanced functionality. In addition to the accounting system (personnel records, scheduling, workflow, time tracking, pension and military records, etc.), and finance management (salaries, tax payments, allowances and deductions, and so on.) and modules that process all this data, they also include HR-module to assess the quality of employees work.

EAM Systems

EAM-system is a complex designed to automate the processes associated with the maintenance of the equipment, its repair and after-sales service. Such system can be used in enterprises with significant production capacity, or enterprises who demand a reliable and trouble-free operation of the equipment. Usage of EAM-systems help reduce the costs associated with the repair and maintenance of equipment, which greatly affects the issue of uninterrupted production, reducing unplanned downtime and ultimately helps to reduce production costs, and thus increase the final profits of the enterprise.

EDMS Systems

EDMS-system is a document management framework in the company. The main goal of these frameworks - creation, logging, storage and archiving of the documents in one database, so the necessary information is not lost in the office workflows.

These systems are optimized for a quick search of the stored information, to improve the data processing speed. In other words, EDMS-system can be compared with a large electronic archive that has a basic workflows functionality. Furthermore, EDMS solve a bunch of other tasks, providing documents version control, access levels, replication to other databases and similar systems.

As an example, you can check out a free simple EDMS-system based on FossLook Platform, developed by FOSS-On-Line:

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