<p>Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is established among a majority of small and medium sized companies in Kista Science City and seems to have a positive effect on organizational effectiveness. Kista Science City is Sweden’s largest corporate centre, with more companies and employees in a limited area than anywhere else in Europe. This study looks at the level of adoption of ERP functions, perceived organizational effectiveness and critical success factors. The most common use of ERP is for financial control and reporting, followed by order entry and purchasing. A significant relationship between the level of adoption and organizational effectiveness was found.</p><p>Although Enterprise Resource Planning has become an established phenomenon the investments in ERP software are far from fully utilized. Most companies have started to use ERP to integrate functional areas but few companies have moved to extended ERP (ERPII). The adoption of functionality for customer relationship management seems to have started, but the use of e-commerce, business intelligence and supply chain management is very low. Different reasons for the low level of adoption are discussed and it is suggested that the interrelationship between SMEs and ERP-consultants be investigated further. ERP-consultants are important change agents and knowledge transfers for ERP and one way to interpret the data is that ERP-consultants are caught in a negative spiral where they focus on installations and technical maintenance of core ERP, which prevents them from developing new, extended ERP competence.</p><p>An analysis of critical success factors showed that although technical competence was important socially oriented factors such as project teamwork and composition as well as communication had a greater effect on organizational effectiveness. Surprisingly enough, project management did not have any effect on organizational effectiveness. Common implementation methods for ERP focus on project management. It is suggested to further analyse if these methods could be improved by an increased adaptability to differences in company settings and requirements as well as through a better use of critical success factors. Organizational effectiveness can be measured in many ways and it was found that the success factors varied in terms of how they correlated with different measures.</p><p>In the next step, the doctorial thesis, it is suggested that a prototype environment is developed to stimulate an increased use of extended ERP among small and medium sized companies. Several actors, such as SMEs, consultants, vendors and students would be involved. The prototype environment could facilitate enhancements of implementation methods and reduction of implementation costs through the development of reusable objects such as add-on solutions, process maps and system configurations. It could also help small and medium sized companies to investigate the business benefits of ERP by increasing involvement and familiarity while on the same time decrease costs and risks.</p> / QC 20100713

Business continuity is an area of research that ensure continuity of enterprise operations. Business continuity requires knowledge and input from business and IT leaders to assess and manage risks associated with critical business processes to develop a plan that can allow the organization to resume operations. Organizations that have a holistic enterprise risk management approach can better manage business and technology risks. The increasing dependency on technological resources asserts the need to assess business and technology risks to develop business continuity. Nevertheless, governance and enterprise leaders find difficult to determine the scope and impact of risks associated with enterprise operations. In organizational contexts, business continuity planning is perceived as an element of contingency instead of an opportunity for improvement. In addition, there is a lack of academic literature related to the organizational implementation of a business continuity plan. For this reason, there is a need to merge enterprise risk management and governance of enterprise IT views to provide an integrated perspective of business and technological risk in the im-plementation of a business continuity plan.The objective of the study relies on assessing how the implementation of a business continuity plan is conducted, together with its challenges and benefits, to provide insights on the elements that facilitates a business continuity plan implementation. The study focuses on the preparation phase of a business continuity plan, where enterprise risks are identified, evalu-ated and mitigated. The study results are based on a case study performed at a multination retail and manufacturing enterprise in Spain. The results indicates that awareness from the higher governance body and senior management on the dependency that enterprises have developed on IS/IT key resources is a factor that influence how risk management and technology risk is perceived in organizations. This influence how the higher governance body views the need to implement enterprise risk management, governance of enterprise IT and business continuity initiatives. Likewise, the elements facilitating a business continuity imple-mentation are associated with the sponsorship and leadership from organizational actors, the involvement of an external organizational agent that can bring expertise and methodology related to business continuity planning, identification of enterprise critical areas and processes and the creation of business and IT risk scenarios to depict threats to the organization operations and processes. This internal reflection brings challenges and benefits to the or-ganization and both are addressed in the study.The study concludes with the presentation of two high level frameworks that can aid enter-prise leaders to visualize and understand the influence that enterprise risk management and governance of enterprise IT has on the implementation of a business continuity plan and the underlying elements that facilitate a business continuity plan implementation in organizations.

Enterprise is often described as risk for reward, but it may be possible to reduce the risk while improving returns. According to SEDA, failure rates of SMMEs in South Africa range from 70 to 80 percent. The need for this study arose when it was found that most SMMEs did not have a formal system in place to mitigate their risks right from the outset in the feasibility study, the business plan design and the start–up of the business. This lack of mitigation controls could be a result of a lack of understanding of the enterprise risk management (ERM) methodology or an inappropriate ERM decision–making model to assist them in a way that would mitigate their risk and minimise financial losses. The ERM approach can anticipate unplanned occurrences and is a systematic way of foreseeing the future. Entrepreneurs and business owners take on risks to pursue new business objectives within their respective risk appetites. This study also evaluated several models of risk identification and the ERM methodology. In this study an ERM model, ISO 31000, was applied in a business case and a comparison was made between the risks identified in the business plan and the ERM approach. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Enterprise is often described as risk for reward, but it may be possible to reduce the risk while improving returns. According to SEDA, failure rates of SMMEs in South Africa range from 70 to 80 percent. The need for this study arose when it was found that most SMMEs did not have a formal system in place to mitigate their risks right from the outset in the feasibility study, the business plan design and the start–up of the business. This lack of mitigation controls could be a result of a lack of understanding of the enterprise risk management (ERM) methodology or an inappropriate ERM decision–making model to assist them in a way that would mitigate their risk and minimise financial losses. The ERM approach can anticipate unplanned occurrences and is a systematic way of foreseeing the future. Entrepreneurs and business owners take on risks to pursue new business objectives within their respective risk appetites. This study also evaluated several models of risk identification and the ERM methodology. In this study an ERM model, ISO 31000, was applied in a business case and a comparison was made between the risks identified in the business plan and the ERM approach. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Enterprise crowdsourcing transforms the way in which traditional business tasks can be processed by harnessing the collective intelligence and workforce of a large and often diver-sified group of people. At the present time, data and information residing within enterprise crowdsourcing systems and other business applications are insufficiently interlinked and are rarely made publicly available in an open and semantically structured manner – neither to the corporate intranet nor to the World Wide Web (WWW). However, the semantic annotation of enterprise crowdsourcing activities is a promising research and application domain. The Semantic Web and its related technologies, methods and principles for publishing structured data offer an extension of the traditional layout-oriented Web to provide more intelligent and complex services. This technical report describes the efforts toward a universal and lightweight yet powerful Semantic Web vocabulary for the domain of enterprise crowdsourcing. As a methodology for developing the vocabulary, the approach of ontology engineering is applied. To illustrate the purpose and to limit the scope of the ontology, several informal competency questions as well as functional and non-functional requirements are presented. The subsequent con-ceptualization of the ontology applies different sources of knowledge and considers various perspectives. A set of semantic entities is derived from a review of existing crowdsourcing applications and a review of recent crowdsourcing literature. During the domain capture, all partial results of the review are integrated into a consistent data dictionary and structured as a UML data schema. The designed ontology includes 24 classes, 22 object properties and 30 datatype properties to describe the key aspects of a crowdsourcing model (CSM). To demonstrate the technical feasibility, the ontology is implemented using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Finally, the ontology is evaluated by means of transforming informal to formal competency questions, comparing it to existing semantic vocabularies, and calculat-ing ontology metrics. Evidence is shown that the CSM ontology covers the key representa-tional needs of the enterprise crowdsourcing domain. At the end of the technical report, cur-rent limitations are illustrated and directions for future research are proposed.

In this study, a research is developed to establish a comprehensive framework for ERP systems selection process and provide guidance for better ERP systems selection and evaluation by investigating all the aspects of the selection process. The research is conducted through a comprehensive study prior to key information systems journals, conferences, overall enterprise information systems materials in electronic databases, and also in practitioner journals. As a result, the study is able to present a comprehensive framework for ERP systems selection process, identify the problematic issues, reveal the ways to improve the selection activities, and present a road-map for the selection process.

Während Open Source-Software wie etwa Linux, der Apace Webserver oder die OpenOffice-Suite eine grosse Verbreitung erfahren haben, sind Open Source-Lösungen zur Unterstützung betrieblicher Aufgaben weniger bekannt. Dieser Bericht unternimmt ausgehend von den funktionalen Anforderungen der Auftragsabwicklung eines Industrieunternehmens einen Vergleich bestehender Lösungen und diskutiert die Einsatzmöglichkeiten aus heutiger Sicht.

Univ., Diss.--Bayreuth, 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 224 - 239.

Zugl.: Oldenburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2009.

Thesis (MScEng)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The environment within which most organisations operate is ever-changing. In such a dynamic environment the only way an organisation is able to not just survive but thrive is by continuously, effectively and efficiently transforming/re-engineering itself (Hammer & Champy, 2001). Luckily, many organisations have realised and accepted this fact. The problem, however, is that the majority of transformation initiatives, launched by organisations, are unsuccessful. In fact, according to (Blanchard K. , 2010), 70% of change initiatives fail. There can only be two possible reasons for the existence of this very serious problem. Organisations either implement the wrong kinds of change initiatives or they ineffectively manage and execute the transformation efforts that they initiate. To solve this problem, an organisation needs to make use of a structured and integrated enterprise engineering methodology that enables it to effectively manage and execute the right kind of change initiatives (Martin, 1995). In the literature that was reviewed, very few structured and integrated enterprise engineering methodologies were found to exist. The objective of this study was to bridge this research gap. In other words, the objective of this study was to develop a structured and integrated enterprise engineering methodology. Developing the enterprise engineering methodology was done by following a basic system engineering process consisting of the following four steps: requirements analysis, system design, system development and system validation. During the requirements analysis step the functional characteristics that the enterprise engineering methodology needed to possess were identified. The purpose of the system design step was to firstly identify the set of methods that the enterprise engineering methodology should consist of and secondly to determine how these methods fit together to form an integrated methodology. The purpose of the system development step was to describe each of the methods that the enterprise engineering methodology needed to consist of in terms of how it is utilised as well as who should be involved during its utilisation. Lastly, during the system validation step the enterprise engineering methodology was evaluated based on how well it satisfies its functional requirements. Expert interviews as well as a case study were used to do this. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die meerderheid organisasies, huidiglik in bestaan, wroeg met die konstante veranderinge wat plaasvind in die omgewing rondom hulle. In so ‘n dinamiese omgewing is ‘n organisasie se toekomstige winsgewendheid en groei hewiglik afhanklik van sy bevoegdheid om aaneenlopend en effektief veranderinge aan te bring (Hammer & Champy, 2001). Die probleem is dat 70% van transformasie-inisiatiewe wat geloots word nie die voordele wat van hulle verwag word suksesvol lewer nie (Blanchard K. , 2010). Hoekom gebeur dit? Hoekom is net 30% van transformasie-inisiatiewe wat geloots word suksesvol? Daar is net twee moontlike redes vir die bestaan van hierdie probleem. Organisasies loots óf die verkeerde tipe transformasie-inisiatiewe óf hulle bestuur hulle transformasie-inisiatiewe op ‘n oneffektiewe manier. Om te verseker dat ‘n organisasie nie in hierdie strik trap nie, moet dit gebruik maak van ‘n gestruktureerde en geїntegreerde besigheidstransformasie-metodologie wat die proses van verandering vergemaklik (Martin, 1995). In die literatuur wat tot dusver nagevors is, kon daar maar ‘n handjievol besigheidstransformasie-metodologiëe opgespoor word. Die doel van hierdie studie was om hierdie gaping in die literatuur te vul. Met ander woorde, die doel van hierdie studie was om ‘n gestruktureerde en geїntegreerde besigheidstransformasie-metodologie te ontwikkel. ‘n Stelselontwikkelingsproses is gevolg om hierdie metodologie te ontwikkel. Die vier stappe wat deel gevorm het van hierdie stelselontwikkelingsproses is die volgende: vereistebeskrywing, stelselontwerp, stelselontwikkeling en stelselvalidasie. Tydens die vereistebeskrywingstap van die proses is die funksionele eienskappe wat die besigheidstransformasie-metodologie moet besit geïdentifiseer. Die doel van die stelselontwerpstap was eerstens om die metodes waaruit die metodologie moet bestaan te identifiseer en tweedens om die wisselwerking tussen die metodes te bepaal. Die doel van die stelselontwikkelingstap was om elkeen van die metodes waaruit die metodologie moet bestaan te beskryf in terme van hoe dit toegepas word, asook wie betrokke behoort te wees tydens die gebruik daarvan. Tydens die stelselvalidasiestap is die metodologie geëvalueer in terme van hoe effektief dit die geïdentifiseerde funksionele behoeftes bevredig. Onderhoude met deskundiges asook ‘n gevallestudie is gebruik om dit te doen.