ERP and Configuration Introduction

One student one ERP programme

This visual guide is part of a collection of documents created by the One Student One ERP (OSOE) project in collaboration with Institut Mines Telecom, Telecom Bretagne, Dresden University of Technology and the South Westfalia University of Applied Sciences. It can be used to teach modern ERP theory and practice to undergraduate students or professionals.

This chapter introduces the lecture goal, organisation and evaluation.

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Agenda

In this presentation, we are going to explain how this lecture was designed. First, we define the goals of the course and especially what students can expect to learn by attending the course. Second, we explain the organisation of the lecture as a sequence of theory and tutorials that cover the different aspects of an ERP. Last we introduce the student evaluation process based on a case study and questionnaire.

Course Objectives

"ERP: Theory, Practice and Configuration" is a lesson which has four main goals.

Sessions organisation

Sessions organisation

Six sessions of three hours each organised as described on the picture above.

Every session will be organised in the same manner:

We will begin with a presentation of the theoretical and universal workflow of the company. Then you will have time to work on the following ERP5 tutorials related to the studied workflows.

We will now see the program of the six sessions.

Session 1: Carreers and Assignments

Session 1: Carreers and Assignments

During session one, we will see how to handle career and assignment in today's ERP systems.

These two notions "Careers" and "Assignments" are here to help people to manage human resources.

The career workflow is very simple since careers are made of career steps which come one after the other.

Assignments are a little bit different since a person can have many assignments in the same time.

Once career and assignment be studied, we will then spend time on the first five ERP5 Tutorials which are:

Session 2: CRM Tickets and Events

Session 2: CRM Tickets and Events

Session two is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

We will study Tickets and Events, and their specific workflows. Events are documents in the system which represent every interaction we have with our customers, our suppliers etc.

Recording every "Event" which occurred during the company's activity will help us to learn more about our customers and our suppliers. Further information about what have been done with or said to a specific person will be available to persons who need it.

Tickets are documents in ERP5 which can contain other documents such as Events or documents from the Document Management System (DMS).

Having such records will help you to organise and follow your interaction with persons outside the company. Specific workflows are applied to Tickets depending on their nature.

In ERP5 we have four kinds of Tickets: Campaigns, Sale Opportunities, Support Requests and Meetings. Five tutorials will be presented:

Session 3: Sale Orders

Session 3: Sale Orders

Session 3 will teach you the universal workflow of a Sale/Purchase Order.

The Sale/Purchase order document in an ERP is the one which will handle trade from the early phase of an offer to the final order made by you or the client.

We will then follow the following three tutorials:

Session 4: Packing Lists

Session 4: Sale Packing Lists

Session 4 is about packing lists.

Packing lists are used to trace the movements of products or services. Once an order has been made, products or services have to be delivered. In the case of products, either to send the products to the customer, or to receive them from the supplier.

We will then follow the following three tutorials:

Session 5: IFRS Accounting

Session 5: IFRS Accounting

Session 5 will be about IFRS accounting.

During this session we will see what is IFRS accounting and what is the workflow of an accounting transaction (eg, invoice transaction).

We will follow the following two tutorials:

Session 6: Document Management

Session 6: Document Management

Document management is a very important point of ERP system. It allows companies to organise and share their knowledge. This session will be a quick tutorial of how to manage electronical documents in this orders:

Session 7: ERP Consulting and Configuration

Session 7: ERP Consulting and Configuration

During the last session you will learn how to perform an initial consulting process for an ERP Implementation and how to configure ERP5 Categories.

This lecture about consulting and configuration has been simplified for Coursera MOOC environment. For this purpose you will be provided with a sample interview of a small business CEO and a sample configuration case. Based on these materials, you will have to fill a last quiz.

We also provide some extra materials as a reference, so that everyone can understand the general idea of configuration.

The 10 best students of this MOOC will then be offered to receive a personal coaching to apply the configuration principles to the company of their choice, use the online questionnaire system and build their own categories.

Case Study

The case study presents Zawee, a small retail fashion shop in Paris. An example of complete interview is provided. You will see the answers to the most important questions in the questionnaire for this company and learn which category configuration results from these answers.

Evaluation is then be conducted with a standard quiz, which should be fairly easy to fill.

Reward: one more evaluation

As a reward, the best students on Coursera MOOC will be offered... one more evaluation in the form of a personal coach. This coach will guide them to configure an ERP for the company of their choice by filling an online questionnaire and defining categories. The coach will help the student to improve its configuration until it has reached sufficient quality

This online education process has been described in Dr. Klaus Woelfel's PhD: Automatisierungsansätze zur Unterstützung der ERP-Kategorienkonfiguration für KMU (partly in English). In the mid-term, we hope that it can be integrated to Coursera platform, once the number of sample cases is sufficient.

For students who can not participate to this coaching, they should simply study in detail the Zawee case and in particular how categories were configured for Zawee.