Integrated Research and Training in Enterprise Information Systems

The success of implementing Enterprise Information System (EIS) depends on exploring and improving the EIS software, and EIS software training. However, the synthesis of the EIS implementation approach has not been investigated. In this chapter, the authors propose an integrated research and training approach for students and employees about enterprise information systems (EIS) that are encountered in an organization. Our integrated approach follows the different stages of a typical EIS project from inception to completion. These stages, as identified, are modeling, planning, simulation, transaction, integration, and control. This ensures that an employee who is trained by this plan has an acquaintance with the typical information systems in an organization. Further, for training and research purposes the authors developed prototype information systems that emulate the ones usually found in organizations. This ensures the EIS software logic is consistent with the business logic. This chapter also discuss some of the case studies conducted with the prototype systems.

Achieving System and Business Interoperability by Semantic Web Services

Much of the early focus in the area of Semantic Web has been on the development of representation languages for static conceptual information; while there has been less emphasis on how to make Semantic Web applications practically useful in the context of knowledge work. To achieve this, a better coupling is needed between ontology, service descriptions, and workflow modeling, including both traditional production workflow and interactive workflow techniques. This chapter reviews the basic technologies involved in this area to provide system and business interoperability, and outlines what can be achieved by merging them in the context of real-world workflow descriptions.

Information Technology Usage in Maquila Enterprises

The build-up of export-oriented companies since 1990s on the Mexico-USA boarder, and their recent decline, is no surprise to many policy analysts. The focus on the use of low-wage employees, neglecting skills, and infrastructure creation was doomed to fail. Much of the Mexican maquila operations and jobs have gone to China and other low-wage countries. Are maquiladoras technologically competent to ward-off competitive forces from China and other parts of the world? This chapter presents an exploratory study of IT usage and managerial perceptions of IT-related costs and benefits in maquiladoras. The relevant data was gathered through a survey questionnaire. The results show that IT had a positive impact on maquila business performance. These findings will be useful to managers in assessing their organization and taking corrective actions to become further competitive.

Significance of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Nominal Group Technique (NGT) in ERP Implementation

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is an integrated software system reflecting the business processes of an enterprise. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a generic term for integrated systems for corporate computing that supersedes concepts such as Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) of the 1970s and, later, Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) of the 1980s. The objective of customization in ERP implementation is to achieve a fit between the ERP system and the business process that the system supports. Literature review reveals that the customization is the major annoyance in most of the ERP projects. A solution is proposed using a process framework that incorporates participatory learning and decision-making processes based on Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and the evaluation methodology adopting the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). A case study is presented to illustrate its applicability in practice. The upshot of the study is the identification of various customization possibilities for ERP implementation. This study is meant to help managers think about the various feasible customization options available to them. Future research work that can be done in ERP software customization is also indicated.

Service-Oriented Middleware for Managing Inter-Enterprise Collaborations

Participation in electronic business networks has become necessary for the success of enterprises. The strategic business needs for participating in multiple networks simultaneously and for managing changes in these networks are reflected as new requirements for the supporting computing facilities. The Pilarcos architecture addresses the needs of managed collaboration and interoperability of autonomous business services in an inter-organisational context. The Pilarcos B2B middleware is designed for lowering the cost and effort of collaboration establishment and to facilitate the management and maintenance of electronic business networks. The approach is a federated one: All business services are developed independently, and the provided B2B middleware services are used to ensure that technical, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability is maintained in the business network. In the architecture and middleware functionality design, attention has been given to the dynamic aspects and evolution of the network. This chapter discusses the concepts provided for application and business network creators, and the supporting middleware-level knowledge repositories for interoperability support.

Enterprise Systems, Control and Drift

Enterprise Systems are widespread in current organizations and seen as integrating organizational procedures across functional divisions. An Enterprise System, once installed, seems to enable or constrain certain actions by users, which have an impact on organizational operations. Those actions may result in increased organizational control, or may lead to organizational drift. The processes that give rise to such outcomes are investigated in this chapter, which is based on a field study of five companies. By drawing on the theoretical concepts of human and machine agencies, as well as the embedding and disembedding of information in the system, this chapter argues that control and drift arising from the use of an Enterprise System are outcomes of the processes of embedding and disembedding human actions, which are afforded (enabled or constrained) by the Enterprise System.

Modeling Buyer-Supplier Relationships in Dynamic Supply Chains

The key part of dynamic supply chain management is negotiating with suppliers and with buyers. Designing efficient business processes throughout the supply chain, and controlling their speed, timing, and interaction with one another, is decisive factors in a competitive and dynamic environment. Coordination is essential for successful supply chain management. Therefore, in this chapter, a novel Negotiation-to-Coordinate (N2C) mechanism is proposed to explore the interactive nature of the buyersupplier relationships for dynamic environments. The proposed N2C mechanism uses prioritized fuzzy constraints to represent trade-offs among the different probable values associated with the negotiation issues and to signify how agents should make concessions. Supervisor agent in the N2C mechanism takes into account the conflicts of interest of buyer’s agent and supplier’s agent and the proposal and plan generated by supervisor agents helps in resolving the true and potential conflicts of interests for buyer’s agent and supplier’s agent. The proposed computational framework based on fuzzy constraints is suited for capturing the dynamics by modeling trade-offs between different attributes of a product leading to a fair and equitable deal for both suppliers and buyers. The proposed approach models the intricacies in the face of the imprecise, uncertain and conflicting nature of objectives. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through an illustrative example.

Measuring and Diffusing Data Quality in a Peer-to-Peer Architecture

Data quality is a complex concept defined by various dimensions such as accuracy, currency, completeness, and consistency (Wang & Strong, 1996). Recent research has highlighted the importance of data quality issues in various contexts. In particular, in some specific environments characterized by extensive data replication high quality of data is a strict requirement. Among such environments, this article focuses on Cooperative Information Systems. Cooperative information systems (CISs) are all distributed and heterogeneous information systems that cooperate by sharing information, constraints, and goals (Mylopoulos & Papazoglou, 1997). Quality of data is a necessary requirement for a CIS. Indeed, a system in the CIS will not easily exchange data with another system without knowledge of the quality of data provided by the other system, thus resulting in a reduced cooperation. Also, when the quality of exchanged data is poor, there is a progressive deterioration of the overall data quality in the CIS. On the other hand, the high degree of data replication that characterizes a CIS can be exploited for improving data quality, as different copies of the same data may be compared in order to detect quality problems and possibly solve them. In Scannapieco, Virgillito, Marchetti, Mecella, and Baldoni (2004) and Mecella et al. (2003), the DaQuinCIS architecture is described as an architecture managing data quality in cooperative contexts, in order to avoid the spread of low-quality data and to exploit data replication for the improvement of the overall quality of cooperative data. In this article we will describe the design of a component of our system named as, quality factory. The quality factory has the purpose of evaluating quality of XML data sources of the cooperative system. While the need for such a component had been previously identified, this article first presents the design of the quality factory and proposes an overall methodology to evaluate the quality of XML data sources. Quality values measured by the quality factory are used by the data quality broker. The data quality broker has two main functionalities: 1) quality brokering that allows users to select data in the CIS according to their quality; 2) quality improvement that diffuses best quality copies of data in the CIS.

The Impact of Culture on the Perception of Information System Success

Research has showed that social and socio-technical concepts are influenced by culture. The objective of this chapter is to explore how the socio-technical concept of information system success is defined and perceived by a group of French managers. The results show that culture does influence IS success perception. The study has many implications for both academic and practice communities. The results are especially important to multinational organizations that standardize IS in different cultures including France. The research case is a multibillion dollar Canadian multinational organization which decided to standardize an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in all its worldwide subsidiaries.

A Voice-Enabled Pervasive Web System with Self-Optimization Capability for Supporting Enterprise Applications

Other than providing Web services through popular Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing may offer new ways of accessing Internet applications by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end-users, and its technology could involve new ways of interfacing with various types of gateways to back-end servers from any device, anytime, and anywhere. In this chapter, mobile phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a voice-enabled Web system (VWS), through voice user interface technology. Today’s Web sites are intricate but not intelligent, so finding an efficient method to assist user searching is particularly important. One of these efficient methods is to construct an adaptive Web site. This chapter shows that multimodal userinterface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML. It also describes how VWS was designed to provide an adaptive voice interface using an Apache Web server, a voice server, a Java servlet engine, and a genetic algorithm based voice Web restructuring mechanism.