What is ERP?

No matter if you're an excutive office, IT consultant, software developer or a business manager, you've heard people talk about ERP in meetings and sessions.  And probably a half-dozen of ERP providers have already come knocking at your office door to present their products.

No doubt that you have spent hours searching the internet on what exactly is an ERP and how can it help an organisation.  But if you're still in doubt, this writing may help you.  I'll try to explain the golden characterisitics of an ERP in a simple language; so please bear with me.

The Definition

ERP is an integrated, business process oriented and best practice based information system that helps managers better understand the situation of their organisations.

So a software that is called an ERP is:

1. Intergrated
2. Business process oriented
3. Best practice based

and its ultimate goal is to help managers make more efficient decisions.

Integrated (Data)

In an integrated software, what one user does in a organisation can be immediately seen in another organisation by another user.

For instance, in a trade firm, as soon as a purchase invoice is entered and approved, it may immediately effect the product cost and accounts payable and change the P/L.  In such a system, when receiving a customer payment, the finance user can instantly check for which invoice this payment is happening and what are the payment terms.  Upon entering and approving the payment, the customer's receivables decreases and at the same time the sales staff may be notified.

Figure 1: Sample Integrated Information System (note that there is only one place to store/retrieve data)

The subtle point is that those series of events take place without requiring an administrator.  In other words, it is easily and flawlessly possible because all the software data resides in a single logical place and there is no clutter.

Business Process Oriented

From ERP point of view, the performance of your organisation is the result of execution of several business processes each of which covering a slice of your organisation and involving different layers of that slice to do the job; just like a slice of cake which cuts through different layers of the cake.

For example, in a trade firm, the sales business process involves sales, finance and procurement (if needed) departments and in each of them one or more users or organisation roles play a key role in performing the process.  Look at figure 2:

Figure 2: An exampe of business process oriented view of organisational perforamnce

As you can clearly see, sales business process involves the whole organisation in worst case.  If we look closely, we can understand how being integrated helps; for example a requisition is created based on sales order, a purchase order is created based on the requisition and purchase invoice is issued as a consequence of a sales order and all the links of this chain of actions are stored in one logical place, meaning that there is no need for any extra action from the staff; they just need to do their job which is running the process.

Now look at figure 3:

Figure 3: Information back-link in ERP

As a result of data integration and mapping organisational performance to business process execution we have a consistent chain of documents which enable us to accurately find out the reason/root of any organisation acitivity at any given time.

Best Practice Based

It is possible that a software taking advantage of a good design reach the above characteristics.  But in that case, still there is something missing to enable the software to help managers in the best possible way: best practice knowledge.

What distinguishes ERP from myriad of softwares claiming the same achievements, is extensive amount of best practice used in its design and configuration; meaning that ERP offers you the most efficient strategies -which have been tested in real life by prominent firms- to manage your organisation.  In fact, from this point of view, ERP is the medium to transfer the optimum management strategies/techniques from successful and well-known firms to others.

This characteristic is vital to an ERP as the only idea behind an ERP is to help managers, manage their organisations better and that is not possible without using optimum strategies.

Helping with Optimum Management

You may wonder why a software company would bother spend considerable amout of money, take a lot of risks and create a software with all the above characteristics?  And why a business manager would think of implementing such an expensive and giant software?

There is a simple rationale:  approaching optimum organisational management.

After a successful implementation, a manager is able to analyse her organisation's performance and accurately find out its weaknesses and strengths and decided how to imporove or use them.  And that is what a manager should do: making decisions.

By handling all the complexity of an integrated data flow, simplifying access to organisational performance information and offering the manager with accurate and up-to-date information, it enables the manager to concentrate on analysing and decision making without wasting her own and her staff's precious time dealing with technical details and report preparation headache.

Consequences
Let's suppose you have successfully implemented ERP in your organisation and it's running smoothly.  What are the benefits for you (as a top-level manager)?

1. ERP integrated data model makes activities more transparent and enables users to access their required information at any time in a real-time manner.  The sales officer doesn't need to call finance dept. by phone to know the open amount of a customer:  ERP gives her what she needs right on time.  As a result, work hours are used more efficiently and personnel do their job based on accurate and real-time information.  This means more accurate and efficient performance for your organisation.
2. Business process based analysis of your organisation provided by ERP, helps you discover the bottlenecks faster and more accurate.  For example, a drop in sales does not always mean the sales staff are incompetent; it may be because of the delay in procurement which eventually leads to late delivery and customer unhappiness.  With ERP you look at your organisation from above as a collection of (usually) inter-connected business processes not as a handful of separate departments.
3. Using best practices in every day business is a key factor to your organisation success!  Now, thanks to ERP you can simply adopt the most efficient strategies taken from sucessful companies.  For example if you are the manager of an automotive business firm, you can enjoy the best practices applied by Mercedes Benz and that is a 100% win -unless you're the Benz's manager herslef :-)

Conclusion
ERP is an information system which is integrated, business process oriented and based on best practices and its main audience/beneficiaries are top-level managers. Successful use of ERP makes your organisation operate faster and more accurate and considerably improves your understanding of the performance of  your organisation.  ERP makes space for you to do your job: making decisions.

Persian Utils

I'll do this in a telegraphic manner since it's too late and my eyes are burning with sleep.

I've created a repository on GitHub named persianutils.  The goal is to put the solution to the Persian locale specific problems I encounter out there so it might help others from searching the net for hours.

Currently there's a module calendar.py which implements date conversion from Persian to Gregorian calendar and vice versa.

Good vs. Bad & Ugly: Comprehensive vs. General Design

Let's assume a simple categorisation of business into trade and manufacturing.
Most of the companies that are active in a category, arrange and manage their processes - despite different fields of business- inspired by a similar and close to optimal pattern.  For example all trade companies share the same processes and concepts such as sales region, sales commission, petty cash and etc.  The pattern is called "best practice".

Good

Now, imagine that you have designed and implemented information software for 25 trade companies so far; naturally resulting in your extensive knowledge of trade firms' processes and requirements -put simply, best practice.  In other words, you do know what the customer wants and needs.

What happens if you decide to design a comprehensive information system for trade firms? As you know their requirements and best practices, supported by the trade business knowledge and understanding which you have already earned during last 25 implementations, you design a model that, with minimum complexity and maximum clarity, covers most of the a typical trade firm' processes. Not only your model but also your user interface are efficient and understandable by the customer.

This is what I call a "Comprehensive Design".

Obviously the model doesn't cover all processes in all trade firms but, those non-covered are a small fraction compared to what the model already covers.  In fact, your model embraces about 80 to 85% of a typical trade firm's processes which leaves you 15 to 20% customisation during an implementation.  The percentages I just mentioned are very famous in ERP world. 

Bad & Ugly

Now, imagine a totally different situation: you have designed and implemented information systems for 2 trade companies so far and all of a sudden you decide to design an information systems for trade firms in general. Let's see how your design is.

Clearly, the knowledge of a typical trade firm requirements and best practices which you've acquired during your 2 implementations -even if both were successful- is not extensive. So when designing you have take care of all the possible requirements -which you're not aware of yet- by designing facilities to easily change the behaviour of the model. This is the key characteristic of your design, happening all over your model since you don't know the real world's requirements and need to prepare for meeting them.

Actually, your model is a "General Design".

It doesn't have a skeleton -the extract of your experience and knowledge- rather it has lots of lots of features that help users customise all the aspects of it and all because you don't know what you'll be facing in a typical trade firm.
There is a design principle stating that "The design and usage complexity of a software is proportional to how much the software is generalised." In other words, the more general your design the more difficult its development and usage.

Because it is complex and doesn't have a real structure, the result is not a software that has a shape but such a flexible set of -sometimes inconsistent- customisation features that it hardly has any shape. Practically, you have to create a new software out of all the customisation features, In every implementation using the general design. 

Conclusion

• Comprehensive design is based on business knowledge, understanding the target market requirements and best practices and experience.
• Comprehensive design is easily grasped by users and it is easy to use.
• General design is based on a considerable technical knowledge, little business knowledge and incomplete understanding of the target market requirements and best practices.
• General design is complicated and not friendly from the user's perspective.

The following statement is a concise and precise summary:

"Do not generalise.  Generalisations are generally wrong." -Butler Lampson

Amailyser - The E-mail Analyser

Recently Ed Daniel (a friend of mine) needed to produce a time analysis report out of his e-mails and asked if I can help him.  Well, obviously I said yes.


I thought to myself, he needs charts and graphs and data querying from many aspects that I may not know.  So to me the best option is to load his e-mail important fields into an RDBMS (such as SQLite or PostgreSQL).  Later he can do whatever he wants with the data using reporting tools such as JasperReports and produce nice charts and graphs as he requires.


That was the motivation to write Amailyser (on GitHub).

• The language is Python 2.x; I could have done it in Perl but I'm learning Python and it seems like a wonderful practice to me. 

• For DB interaction I used SQLAlchemy a nice ORM mapper for Python.

• To read the e-mail messages I used Python standard library mailbox.

After downloading and extracting, you can run the Amailyzer (after you have modified config.py to suite your needs)  in a terminal:

$ cd amailyser/src

$ python main.py


The big picture is to read mailboxes, load each message, extract important fields and persist them in the database.

Below is the structure of the source:

Amailyser source tree

• config.py: This is where you can change the behaviour of Amailyser like which mailboxes to process and type of each of them.
• model.py: This is the model of database described in SQLAlchemy.
• workhorse.py: Contains two calsses MailBox and MailMessage.  MailBox opens a mailbox in mbox or maildir formats and processes each message inside using MailMessage which (optionaly) persists them to the database.
• main.py: Actually as a main is supposed to be, it doesn't anything special.  Just calls model setup routines and iteraties over items in the list of mail boxes, passing each one to MailBox.

To install SQLAlchemy please visit the tutorial on its website.