The crescent demand for enterprise management software has as key factor big companies, which need to manage millions of records trying with that: find a better way of working with so great amount of information available in their huge databases and get to the target of their business.

Between the most used software for enterprise management are the ones that lie in one of the following main categories:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Balanced Scorecard or Scoreboard (BSC)

ERP

Resources planning in a company (ERP) include or try to include all the company’s data and processes in a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple software and hardware components to achieve integration. A key ingredient for most ERP system is the use of a unified database to store the data from the various modules of the system.

CRM

Customer relationship management uses software products developed to help the companies in the construction and keeping of a good relationship with their clients. This is done through the storage of information of each client in an efficient and intelligent way. CRM is a general term that encompasses concepts used by the companies to manage their clients and includes capture, storage and analysis of data, suppliers, partners and internal processes information.

SCM

Supply chain management is the process of planning, implementing and controlling the operations of the supply chain to the highest efficiency degree possible. SCM includes all the transport logistics and storage of raw material and ready products from the origin to the destiny consumption market.

BSC

Balanced scorecard or scoreboard is a concept used to measure if the activities of a company are yielding expected results in terms of the strategic vision. Its focus isn’t only the financial result but also human questions. It helps in the provisioning of a more comprehensive vision of an organization what in its turn helps the companies to act according to the best way possible in a long term basis.

How is it used?

All these software work integrated.

The chairman, VP, CFO, CEO, CIO, CTO, etc., simply sat down in front of their computer and request a report. The systems then combine the data stored in unified databases, which have all the company’s historical data using technologies such as OLAP and OLTP. Business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, etc, are concepts extensively applied to do the junction of enterprise data.

It has all to do with relevant data and how to better combine them through (SQL queries) to extract useful information. Information = processed data = money! :-)

My computer engineering final project verses about LINQ (Language Integrated Query), that is, the integration of the query language (SQL) into the programming language (specifically C#). It's a good starting point for those that wanna learn the principles of working with queries to extract useful information from databases.

What to expect from the future?

The good part of it is that this market is growing in a fast pace. This way, a lot of job opportunities are emerging.

I particularly have interest in this field: databases, computer networks, BI, HPC, etc. My area of specialization will be for sure system analysis with focus on software engineering and infrastructure.

I expect to work in this field in a near future. It’s really interesting and challenging because there are always details that can be improved, optimized.

Information management (IM) is the key to the proper organization of a company. If a company organizes its data, its income will grow. It’s a proved fact.

Just as a note: one alarming factor that can arise is the security related to all the information of a company what creates the field of information security.

A new area that is attracting attention nowadays is parallel computing, most precisely, high performance computing, which is other very important factor when dealing with huge sets of data as is the case of enterprise management software.

Parallel processing will be the focus on the next years because it is necessary for the next step toward fastest software processing. Long live the dual-quad (many) core processors.