Selling EA to people in need

Week 3: Selling EA

This week you should focus on the need for an EA. How can you convince management to support an EA initiative?  Find some examples online and share your thoughts.

Write about other EA activities you engaged in the week.

Selling EA to people in need

Who need EA and what do they need EA to do?

Since we want to convince the management, we should ask ourselves to find out a clear idea of companies and EA.

A)      Who should be the right person you are going to sell EA?

Definitely, it is not the grass-root staff and managers, but the CEO and senior managers.

B)      What do the managers and CEO want to do?

They want to improve labor efficiency of the company to help them earn more money. In all the aspects influencing labor efficiency, the increasing information matters a lot. Solving the information problems can help the company.

C)       What are the problems in their companies on information?

The increasing information means more chance in business, and in the meantime means risk to companies. Although the problems may happen in different departments, the results of them are same----it is hard to communicate with each other or even in the department itself. When the CEO needs to get the statistics, they should wait for quite a long time. Without valuable and timely information, the efficiency of information transmission is limited. How to use enterprise information efficiently and establish its own competitive advantage is a big challenge for every company.

D)      How can EA help in solving such problems?

Generally, EA is a method to analyze what the differences between the current company and the expected company, and help to find the way to get through the gap.

In addition, EA can help to make the business respond quickly to the changing market.

EA can manage the business process efficiently, and ensure the strategy implement.

EA can make sure that the information consistence across departments.

EA can map the IT blueprint and cut cost in the future IT integration.

E)       Are there some successful cases in using EA?

Absolutely.

Case: China Vanke Co.,Ltd. (This case is translated from http://nanchang.kingdee.com/pub/show/2010/12/101203301/8780.html)

Vanke (http://www.vanke.com/) is the biggest and strongest enterprise of real estate in our country.

 

There were some problems in its architecture:

(1)     Although the corporation started the informatization ten years ago, the software systems were separated in different departments at that time. They cannot be integrated to proceed systematic managing and controlling, especially cannot offer valuable information to the supreme leaders.

(2)     The data in the central data base were not used efficiently.

(3)     The most prominent issue is, the corporation did not make an overall plan for informationize, thus, information-isolated islands existed. For example, the financial data in general ledger system, financial center system, and cost system were not integrated.

These problems seriously restricted the information system efficiency.

The decision makers wanted to build up a system that can offer business data at any time to assist the decision-making.

The system should be able to offer real time information of enterprise cash condition, sales, production cost, and schedule, etc.

The system should be able to predict enterprise cash flow and management index.

…

The software company, Kingdee, was hired to design a system to Vanke.

Kindee offered Vanke its EAS (Enterprise Application Suites). It was the first enterprise management software that fused TOGAF-standards SOA frame. In the following part, I will list the examples in policy management and financial management.

In Policy Management, the system offered the company unified basic material, unified financial policy, and unified configuration management. In addition, it offered a basic data management pattern including both sharing and isolated. These policies helped the whole Vanke Corporation worked well in using Kindee EAS systems.

In Financial Management, Kindee built up a financial information management platform which can run in the whole Vanke. It was unified, integrated, flexible, efficient and analyzable, and fulfilled the requirement of Vanke in multi-industry, multi-region, multi-institutional, and multi-task. It realized the branches’ financial accounting centralized.

The Kindee EAS also improved the systems in fund management, business management, etc.

After using the new systems, the chief manager of Vanke cost management department said the following words. By using Kindee EAS, the cost management can be controlled down to even a wire, and the EAS system of Vankee was taking the lead in the peers. The Kindee EAS realized the integration of finance, cost, funds, and business processes.

This is a successful case of EA used in company, containing the situation before and after EA was adopted.