- ERP System in the construction industry :

In the construction industry, ERP application becomes one of the major and essential
requirements to succeed in the construction business. ERP system can be used in the
procurement department by connecting the system to the material suppliers. ERP system can
be used also in the human resource department where HR department can provide a full data
base of the engineers, labors, and all other staff status (salary, joining date, employee code,
positionetc.). Moreover every construction company has financial and accounting
departments, which are the most departments in touch with the ERP system (cash flow,
company overhead etc.). After showing the importance of ERP system in the construction
industry, it will be more effectively to highlight on the advantages and disadvantages of using
ERP system in the construction industry.
The advantages of implementing the ERP systems in the
construction industry:
1- Easy to coordinate and integrate between the work disciplines
(procurement with financial, or financial with HR).
2- Time saving.
3- Availability of information from field level until the
management level
4- Integration in applications in any departments
5- Flexibility and facility to standardizing process or to
accommodate changes and globalization.
6- Achieve balanced people, process and technology changes
across all areas.
7- Apply planning and program management practices
throughout the program life cycle of a project.
The disadvantage of implementing the ERP system in the
construction industry:
1- High implementation cost. It can cost hundred thousand dollars in small construction
companies to a million dollar for large international companies.
2- Delay on return on investment. Long term profit.
Nowadays, implementing ERP system in the construction industry becomes an important step
for successful in order to save time and cost and to control projects with respect to overview and
monitoring all factors affecting these projects projects management (procurement, finance,
and Human resources.).

Implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in

small and mid si z e manufacturing firms.

ERP system developer started to concentrate on the small enterprises. It found that small
manufacturers will be affected if they failed to upgrade their IT technology related to
the ERP system that can communicate with their larger suppl y chai n partners.
Applying ERP system in the small firms can enhance and improve their strategic and
competitive capabilities. However, many small firms are not taking this decision easily
and many of them do not apply the ERP system. The first reason of not rushing in
applying the ERP system is the implementation of ERP efforts of many of their larger
counterparts have resulted in partial failure, and in some cases total abandonment.
Second reason, some small manufacturers have issues with financial resources and may
be forced to adopt, at best, a piecemeal approach to integrating the typically
expensive ERP systems into their facilities.

ERP implementation: a compilation and

success factor

analysis of critical

The analysis of critical success factor should be started by defining the concept of
success in the ERP system. The definition of success in general is varied and it depends
on the view of ERP system user that means it is in accurate to define the success but
what should be taken in consideration is the factors that will lead to successful ERP
system. These factors are summarized by the following points:
1- Support from the top management.
2- Engineering analysis and re-engineering
3- Monitor the implementation project management
4- Weakness analysis and change management criteria and program if required.
5- Selection of team work based on competition.
6- Avoid customization.
7- Education, seminars, and attend training.
8- Communication
9- Hire consultation team for the ERP system.
10- Provide options and vendor packages.
11- Experienced staff technically and business knowledge.
12- Make a studied and effective expectation.
13- Integration of the system.
14- Software development, testing, commissioning, and inspection.
15- Monitoring, controlling, and evaluation.

After summarizing the critical success factor, the article highlighted on case studies of
companies failed to implement the ERP system with causes. The failure factors resulted
from the case studies are summarized by:
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Integration of the two ERP systems without testing properly

Delaying delivery of shipments to distributors and retailers.
In correct order for Excess Shipment costing loses for the company.
Cost over runs (costing time without back profit).
Over budget because of in accurate and mistake in budget study that cause
unexpected costs.
6- Lack of clear goal and Lack of top management support.
7- consultants lacked background information on the business lack of experience
8- ERP system failure because the system not matching the organizational processes

A Comparison of Open Source ERP Systems.

ERP system is an enterprise resource planning system that create integrated product that
plan and manage the majority of operations in a company. There is different system of
ERP, and what make difference is that they integrate across functions to create a single,
unified system rather than a group of separate, insular applications.

Open source ERP systems can be categorized by the following conditions:

1. Free redistribution, including selling or using as component without fee.
2. The Source code must be available in readable form.
3. Derived work must be allowed under the same license conditions.
4. Integrity of the author's source code (licenses may require that
modifications are redistributed only as patches).
5. No discrimination against persons or groups.
6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor.
7. Distribution of license (license applies to all whom the program is
redistributed to, closing up software is forbidden).
8. License must not be specific to a product.
9. License must not restrict other software.

Quality, Impact and Success of ERP Systems:

The articles study based on the issues of the quality and impact of ERP systems from
the view of private sector companies and organizations
countries.

in two Northern European

The study started first by defining the quality term with respect to the ERP system and
defining the impact term with respect to the ERP.
The definition of quality is the parameter that the organization needs to achieve their
goal effectively and provide perspective improvement. While the definition of the
impact term with respect to ERP system is the benefits or outcome of the system and
can be the goal of the organization. After the design stage of ERP system, the ERP
system should be evaluated and tested by checking the quality of ERP system
implementation and study the impact of ERP system to the end user. ERP evaluation
can be summarized by figure (), that explain the five dimensions required to evaluate the
ERP system.

Systems Quality
Information Quality
Individual Impact

ERP
SYSTEM
SUCCESS

Workgroup Impact
Organizational Impact

System Quality is to evaluate the ERP technical installation, and the efficiency of the
ERP system to the organization goal. Informational Quality, is evaluating the outcome
of the ERP system such us checking how correct the workability of ERP system in the
disciplines like project management, and cost over time management. Individual impact
is the effectiveness and efficiency of ERP system by studying the flexibility and
feasibility of the ERP system to the end users. Work group impact, is checking the ERP
efficiency in improving the team work , and the coordination between different
disciplines like working the cost control engineer , procurement engineer , and financial
and accountant department all together working through the ERP system. The
organizational impact, which is the return profit of the ERP system to the organization
or the company employ the ERP system.

Implementation of ERP system in Organizations

The idea of implementing the ERP system in business started when the competition and
challenges increased between organizations which increase the customer expectation.
From all these competitions and challenges, the ERP system started to be implemented
in purpose of saving time and cost to be able to compete in the market. Examples of
benefits of ERP implementation is expanding the product choice, provide more reliable
delivery dates, better customer services, and improve the quality and efficiency of
supply.
ERP implementation provide two major advantages, the first advantage is ERP
implementation integrate all functions and departments of a business together. The
second advantage is the database that ERP will implement. For example, all business
transactions are entered, recorded, processed, monitored and reported. ERP
implementation therefore will allow all business departments to be cooperating and
coordinate all together in a single database which is accessible to the organization
employees.
Moreover, ERP system can be implemented through software packages that allow
integration of all information flows in the company financial , accounting, and human
resource information etc. as illustrated in figure()

ERP Implementation team

Successful ERP system is not enough to success in the organization business. Another
factor required to guarantee the successful of ERP implementation, which is the selection
of the ERP implementation team. The team should be consisting of experienced people
with high knowledge about the ERP implementation skill, past accomplishments, and
ability to be flexible in using the ERP software. In addition to team selection, there
should be a continuous communication, and monitoring from the top management to
control the ERP team. The implementation team is important because it is responsible
for creating the initial detailed project plan and can be able to schedule group of different
projects and assigning responsibilities for different activities, checking the available
resources and inventory and have the ability to take the right decision.

- ERP system selection

ERP system selection is important for ERP implementation to achieve the organization goal
and perspective. There are different steps summarizing the way to select the ERP system to
meet the business goal. The first step is to define the objective, and the vision of the
organization business. This step can be achieved by studying the market, customer needs, and
by engineering and re-engineering analysis. The second step is to create a function list, by
looking at ERP software packages functions and allocate these software to fit the organization
departments requirements and needs. There are other steps that should be considered while
selecting the ERP system like creating a software candidate list, creating request for proposal
(RFP) which typically contains the feature and function list, which describes how the company
wants each department or function to operate, and review the proposals by considering the
strength, and weakness in the proposal.

- Step of ERP implementation

ERP systems can be complex and dicult to implement, but a structured and disciplined approach can
greatly facilitate the implementation. The authors have compiled a list of 11 recommended steps for a
successful implementation. These steps have been integrated from several works

1. Review the pre-implementation process to date.Make sure the system selection process has been satisfactorily
completed and all factors critical to implementation success are in place.
2- Install and test any new hardware. Before attempting to install any software, it is essential to make sure
that the hardware is reliable and is running as expected.
3. Install th e software and perform the computer room pilot. A technical support person from the
software supplier will often install the soft- ware and run a few tests to make sure it is installed correctly.

4. Attend system training. Software training will teach users the keystrokes and transactions required to run
the system.
5. Train on the conference room pilot. The conference room pilot exercises the systems and tests
the users understanding of the system. The project team creates a skeletal business case test
environment which takes the business processes from the beginning, when a customer order is
received, to the end, when the customer order is shipped.
6. Establish security and necessary permissions. Once the training phase is nished, during the
conference room pilot, begin setting the security and permissions necessary to ensure that every
one has access to the information they need.
7. Ensure that all data bridges are suciently robust and the data are suciently accurate. The
data brought across from the old system must be suciently accurate for people to start trusting
the new system.
8. Document policies and procedures. The policy statement is a statement of what is intended to
be accomplished; the procedural steps to accomplish that statement may be detailed in a
owchart format.
9. Bring the entire organization on-line, either in a total cutover or in a phased approach. In a
cold turkey approach, the whole company is eventually brought onto the new system. The
entire company prepares for the cutover date, which would preferably be during a plant
shutdown of one to two weeks. In a phased approach, modules/products/plants are brought online sequentially. After the rst module/product/plant is live, procedures may be rened and
adjusted, and then the remaining modules/products/plants are sequentially implemented. The
phased approach may allow for improvements to be made during the implementation.
10. Celebrate. This can be the most important step. The company has just completed a major
project; the celebration recognizes this and clearly demonstrates the importance of the project to
the organization.
11. Improve continually. The organization can only absorb a limited amount of change during a
nite time period. Change is an on-going process; successful companies understand this and
encourage their employees to use the system to continue to improve.