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Do you want your own fully programmable ERP? - Part 1

By J.C.Melo

We are in a transition phase in the Managerial Administration models of any company or Government, because three factors are summing for that:

1. The new powerful business Information Technologies and its more and more smaller costs, like ERP, CRM, BI, etc.,

2. The creativity of the new MBA to generate value and its corresponding engineering - for example, Feedback Control System - in the administrative and managerial fields,

3. Several different layers in the companies in what refers to its managerial and administrative automation levels.

This created not very orthodox solutions, and one of them is the installation of a Front-End System above the Transational System already existent in your company that - by any reason - cannot be substituted by a "pure" ERP System.

Inside the existent tools and for reasons that will be exposed, we choiced the IBM Lotus Notes software for that purpose, briefly Notes as it's widely known.

The Notes has the following programmable structures that can be used to change and to use in a Front-End System of any online managerial or accounting System that already exists in your company, like ACCPAC/SBT, Macola and others 150 companies:

- It can be integrated into the Internet, to enlarge the area of the DAS/DDC functions at the regional, national or world levels.

- He has the so called Replication, that allows the Head office of a company in New York to change an only field in its local database, and automatically and in Real-Time that same field assumes the same value in the local database of a Branch in Chicago or Tokyo. And vice-versa. That means to have a national database - or regional or world - and not only local. This Replication can be programmed, a field or a group of fields can be Replicated or not, in agreement with the goals of the company.

- Theoretically that would create problems - for example, simultaneously an operator in New York change the content of the local field "m" and an operator in Chicago change the content of its same local field "m" - but Lotus Notes will solved this problem in a transparent way to both users with the use of the Replication, and the conflict doesn't exist.

- Therefore, concisely we are speaking about an only online national database and in Real-Time.

- He has an own Intranet e-mail System and/or through the Internet. This e-mail System differs from the traditional ones because he could be integrated automatically with the Notes database. For example, he can be programmed to send an e-mail to other operator, if - a condition - the field "m" of the database reach the value of "x".