EIS advantages to business ?

Enterprise information systems (EIS) are the integration of the functional information systems (IS) in the company to help business to improve their performance. The usual compositions of the EIS are the Operation, HRM, Finance, Marketing, Warehousing and Customer support systems. The EIS enable data sharing among departments and also with external business partners. The system could allow workers according to their job requirements to access and analyse real-time information and transaction processes across the entire organization for fast action or decision.

Implementing EIS is a necessity for companies with data management problems. The greater the number of applications and databases, the greater the complexity of data management means the higher the EIS implementation necessity. Due to the several ISs in the company and security rules need to be adopted , numerous interfaces are needed to implement data exchange and filtering of data especially to external parties such as vendors and customers.

Companies migrate to EIS due to their existing legacy systems limitations to cope with the business requirements, especially the product sort life cycle, customer order pattern changes, delivery lead time, manufacturing line efficiency and product costing beside several other reasons linked to the IS itself. The Legacy system maintenance cost and upgrading cost are high due to the difficulty and lack of staff to work on application written language which is not used in the newer or more modern technologies. Furthermore, due to the difference in the architectures, the Integration of the Legacy system and sharing of data with newer systems are difficult or almost impossible for more older versions which use predefined and rigid process flows.

The advantages of EIS implementation is to make the company sustain or perform better, increase customer satisfaction, extend the market share and ability to process and synchronise huge amount of data to simple indices by easy to interprets Graphic User Interface (GUI).

The wastage of time and resources are able to be reduced. As an example double data inputs are eliminated which increase the process efficiency, excess or lack of raw material orderings are eliminated which reduce overall material wastage or process down time. Processes will be transformed to fully automated or partial automation with the implementation of EIS. Example of companies implementing automated online customer order such as Asustek, Dell and MSI online order system for computer which are delivered to customer’s premises within days. Company business to business (B2B) transaction can be implemented electronically with the shortest time and reduce of papers printing, emails, phone calls and fax transmission which are comparatively slow and much time are needed to process the information.

Companies need to identify their business objective, needs and problems to be solved before deciding what EIS to be selected and the composition of the ISs to be integrated to ensure the expectations are met. Huge budget are required for complex EIS and lower for less complex ones. The company need to invest prudently in the EIS to maximise the value for money invested while meeting the business expectation and requirement. EIS security is one of the vital part for the company to take special care due to the confidential information or company competitive edge may be known by others when the EIS is hacked or cracked. Hence strong firewall, expert staff and IS rules implementation are some of the vital items for the EIS operation.