Enterprise Resource Planning Tool for Project and Production Control

Abstract

In the world of industry, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems play an important role to create competitive advantage for businesses. An ERP system can help the managers to control the project s progress and facilitate production process. The aim of this thesis is to conduct research to study the elements that create competitive advantage in project and production management and plan an ERP tool that helps the managers to supervise the process of a project s execution or manufacturing of a product. For a project manager, a successful project is the one that is carried out at the right time and at the lowest possible cost while considering the customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a successful production in an industrial plant is one in which products are manufactured at the lowest cost while the goods are of the right quality and are produced at the right time. In order to have an efficient project and production management, we need a Data Management System. The Project Data Management System will assist the project managers by storing the real spent time and costs of work packages in a database and informing the manager about the cost and time deviations of individual activities from the plan during the execution of the project. A Production Data Management System (PDMS) will enable a production manager to maintain and retrieve data regarding the product and production in a database to improving the efficiency of the production. This information will be used by the production managers in the next production planning. In this study we have specified the functionalities of both systems and conducted a survey to evaluate the quality of the planned system. We studied both systems to design, implement and test an integrated system that meets basic requirements of the small and medium size companies. We believe that available tools in the market, such as SAP, are not suitable for small business because these tools are expensive with advanced features and small companies have to spend a lot of money while they will not use most of the features.