الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The fact that competitive advantage is now obtained by innovation and creation of information rather than access to financial or material capital, has led to an interesting new challenge for business and for research.
This present ERP as a software solution integrating various functional spheres in an organization. ERP evolved due to the lack of flexibility, and the difficulty of obtaining from MRPII systems useful management information MRPII was still basically a transaction processor aimed at doing current tasks better and faster.
The waves of change brought by ERP have begun to be felt and appreciated by organizations worldwide Customer-focused applications and analysis have begun moving from theory to implementation by creative, innovative and motivated organizations because they have realized that in today’s environment measuring profitability and organizing to retain customers provides a tremendous and unbeatable strategic advantage.
The ‘Priority Enterprise Management System’ had been selected for this research. The system is a fully integrated ERP software application. It consists of six main modules: Financials, Marketing and Sales, Customer Service, Purchasing, Inventory and Production.
The system had been analyzed and broken down into its subsystems. Inputs to, outputs from, constraints, and resources needed by each subsystem had been identified and incorporated into an information tree structure using ‘InfoTree 32’.
Modeling of the system using the IDEF0 approach has been carried out to predict the effect of changes, and to identify the areas of the system that exhibits a high degree of integration, and hence the more appropriate for further investigation.
Certain performance indices have been selected and others have been developed to evaluate the overall performance of the system in the areas under investigation. These indices takes into account resources utilization, system output, and the flexibility of the system.
Information flow mapping was the next step in the research so as to investigate the performance of the system under different actual operation scenarios. Customer Service module, specifically Customer Calls module; and the financials module, specifically General Ledger module in the IDEF0 model, have been interpreted into a flow maps. These modules have been chosen as result of the stressing needs of analyzing customer-focused applications and due to the high level of integration showed by the IDEF0 model. The flow maps have been simulated using ‘ProcessModel’ simulation environment.
Results of simulation experiments were very informative since it includes many useful decision making data, which could be used to enhance and update features of such module within the ERP system. These results are specifically related to resources utilization and means by which it can be increased, total cost of resources and how it can be reduced, and effective operation of the system that leads to an improvement in the system’s output.