Mumbai University > Mechanical Engineering > Sem 8 > Industrial Engineering And Management

Marks: 5M

Year: May 2015

ERP Modules

1. Financial Accounting and Controlling FICO
2. Material Management MM
3. Sales and Distribution SD
4. Production Planning PP
5. Plant Maintenance PM
6. Human Resource HR
7. Project System PS
8. Quality Management QM
   • The modules of an ERP system can either work as stand-alone units or several modules can be combined together to form an integrated system.
   • The systems are usually designed to operate under several operating platforms such as UNIX, MS Windows NT, Windows 2000, IBM AIX, and HP-UX systems.
   • SAP AG, the largest ERP vendor, provides a number of modules with its famous R/3 ERP system.
   • New modules are introduced by SAP and other vendors in response to the market and technological demand such as the Internet technology.
   • Enterprise systems employ thin client/server (C/S) technology or client/ fat server (C/FS) architecture, creating a decentralized computing environment.
   • In a C/S system a number of client devices operated by end users such as desktop PCs request services from application servers, which in turn get the requested service-related information from the database servers.
   • The requests may be simple data files, data values, communication services, transaction processing or master file updates.

The general practice is to have three-tier architecture.

• In this three-tier system the user interface runs on the client. To run ERP systems relatively powerful PCs (clients) and powerful servers are required where most of the hundreds of thousands of operations are performed.
  • The client/server system functions are performed following three layers of logic: Presentation Layer: Graphical user interface (GUI) or browser for data entry or accessing system functions
  • Application Layer: Business rules, functions, logic, and programs acting on data received/transferred from/to the database servers
  • Database Layer: Management of the organization’s operational or transactional data including metadata; mostly employs industry standard RDBMS with structured query language (SQL) provisions
• This logical arrangement helps the ERP user interface to run on the clients, the processing modules to run on the middle-tier application servers, and the database system to run on the database servers.