Management Information Systems; Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy Questions and Answers 100%

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1) From your reading of the chapter's opening case, Skullcandy chose enterprise resource planning software from which of the following ERP vendors? A) Oracle B) SAP C) IBM D) Microsoft E) Infor ... Global Solutions Answer: B Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 2) Which of the following provides a suite of integrated software modules for finance and accounting, human resources, manufacturing and production, and sales and marketing that allows data to be used by multiple functions and business processes? A) Process management software B) ERP systems C) Groupware D) CRM software E) Supply chain management systems Answer: B Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 3) Enterprise software is built around thousands of predefined business processes that reflect: A) government regulations. B) industry benchmarks. C) best practices. D) cutting edge workflow analyses. E) the firm's culture. Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 1 4) Which of the following is not true about enterprise systems? A) Enterprise systems help firms respond rapidly to customer requests for information or products. B) Enterprise system data have standardized definitions and formats that are accepted by the entire organization. C) Enterprise software is expressly built to allow companies to mimic their unique business practices. D) Enterprise software includes analytical tools to evaluate overall organizational performance. E) Enterprise systems provide firm-wide information to help managers make better decisions. Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 5) You have been asked to implement enterprise software for a manufacturer of kitchen appliances. What is the first step you should take? A) Rewrite the software to support the way the company's business processes work. B) Select the business processes you wish to automate. C) Map the company's business processes to the software's business processes. D) Map the software's business processes to the company's business processes. E) Select the functions of the system you wish to use. Answer: E Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 6) Which of the following enables a company to tailor a particular aspect of enterprise software to the way a company does business? A) Configuration tables B) Web services C) Data dictionaries D) Middleware E) Groupware Answer: A Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 2 7) In order to achieve maximum benefit from an enterprise software package, a business should: A) customize the software to match all of its business processes. B) use only the processes in the software that match its own processes. C) change the way it works to match the software's business processes. D) select only the software that best matches its existing business processes. E) retain legacy systems that best work with the software. Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 8) Implementing enterprise software from Oracle enabled Alcoa to achieve all of the following except: A) reduce requisition-to-pay cycle times. B) reduce accounts payable transaction processing. C) centralize financial activities. D) centralize procurement activities. E) obtain lower prices for raw materials. Answer: E Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 9) Manufacturing and production processes include all of the following except: A) procurement. B) material requirements planning. C) quality control. D) transportation execution. E) product configuration. Answer: E Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 10) Enterprise systems include analytical tools. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 11) An enterprise system can help reduce redundant business processes. Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 12) Extensive customization of enterprise software may degrade system performance. 3 Answer: TRUE Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Application of knowledge LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 13) Identify and describe three major enterprise applications. Answer: Enterprise systems, customer relationship management, and supply chain management are three enterprise applications. Enterprise systems are based on a suite of integrated software modules and a common central database. Enterprise systems utilize enterprise software to support financial and accounting, human resources, manufacturing and production, and sales and marketing processes. Enterprise systems provide many benefits including an enterprise-enabled organization, improved management reporting and decision making, a unified information systems technology platform, and more efficient operations and customer-driven business processes. Supply chain management systems help an organization better manage its supply chain, including planning, sourcing, manufacturing, delivering, and returning items. Supply chain management software can be categorized as a supply chain planning system or as a supply chain execution system. A supply chain planning system enables a firm to generate demand forecasts for a product and to develop sourcing and manufacturing plans for that product. A supply chain execution system manages the flow of products through distribution centers and warehouses to ensure that products are delivered to the right locations in the most efficient manner. Supply chain management benefits include improved customer service and responsiveness, cost reduction, and cash utilization. Customer relationship management systems help firms maximize the benefits of their customer assets. These systems capture and consolidate data from all over the organization and then distribute the results to various systems and customer touch points across the enterprise. Customer relationship management systems can be classified as operational or as analytical. Operational CRM refers to customer-facing applications, such as sales force automation, call center and customer service support, and marketing automation. Analytical CRM refers to customer relationship management applications dealing with the analysis of customer data to provide information for improving business performance. Benefits include increased customer satisfaction, reduced direct marketing costs, more effective marketing, and lower costs for customer acquisition and retention. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 4 14) Identify at least four benefits and four challenges of enterprise systems. Answer: Benefits include: increasing operational efficiency; providing firm-wide information to help decision making; standardized business processes; greater responsiveness to customer needs; greater accuracy in fulfilling product demand; reduction of inventory and inventory costs; reduction in order-to-delivery time; improving business processes; removing redundant processes and systems; lowering costs through centralized processing; and improved decision making. Challenges include: the expense of the software and related costs; the time required for implementation; deep-seated technological changes required, the deep-seated organizational changes required; overcoming organizational resistance; switching costs; data cleansing work required. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 15) You have been hired by Santori, Inc., a small company that imports and distributes an Italian sparkling water. The company is interested in what benefits an enterprise system would bring. Would an enterprise system be appropriate for this company? What steps would you take in determining this? Answer: An enterprise system may be too expensive, although there are enterprise software packages that are available to smaller companies. A hosted enterprise application might be the most economical way to implement an enterprise system. To determine whether this would be beneficial to Santori, I would first look at their existing business processes. It would be ideal to determine if their efficiency meets benchmarks in their industry and allows them to be competitive with other businesses in their niche. Then I would review existing hosted applications to see how the applications business processes matched up with Santori's. It would be important to compare the costs of instituting new business processes with the benefits and cost savings. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 5 16) What business processes are supported by enterprise systems? Give specific examples. Answer: The four major business processes supported by enterprise systems are: • Financial and accounting processes, including general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, cash management and forecasting, product-cost accounting, cost-center accounting, asset accounting, tax accounting, credit management, and financial reporting. • Human resources processes, including personnel administration, time accounting, payroll, personnel planning and development, benefits accounting, applicant tracking, time management, compensation, workforce planning, performance management, and travel expense reporting. • Manufacturing and production processes, including procurement, inventory management, purchasing, shipping, production planning, production scheduling, material requirements planning, quality control, distribution, transportation execution, and plant and equipment maintenance. • Sales and marketing processes, including order processing, quotations, contracts, product configuration, pricing, billing, credit checking, incentive and commission management, and sales planning. Difficulty: Challenging AACSB: Application of knowledge; Written and oral communication LO: 9-1: How do enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? 17) A network of organizations and business processes for procuring raw materials, transforming these materials into intermediate and finished products, and distributing the finished products to customers is called a/an: A) distribution channel. B) supply chain. C) value chain. D) marketing channel. E) information system. Answer: B Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 18) Components or parts of finished products are referred to as: A) upstream materials. B) raw materials. C) secondary products. D) intermediate products. E) mid-chain products. Answer: D Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 6 19) Which of the following refers to a company's suppliers, supplier's suppliers, and the processes for managing relationships with them? A) Supplier's internal supply chain B) External supply chain C) Upstream portion of the supply chain D) Downstream portion of the supply chain E) Onstream portion of the supply chain Answer: C Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 20) Which of the following refers to a company's organizations and processes for distributing and delivering products to the final customers? A) Supplier's internal supply chain B) External supply chain C) Upstream portion of the supply chain D) Downstream portion of the supply chain E) Onstream portion of the supply chain Answer: D Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 21) If manufacturers had perfect information, they could implement a: A) hyper-efficient strategy. B) frictionless strategy. C) streamlined strategy. D) bullwhip strategy. E) just-in-time strategy. Answer: E Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 7 22) Why isn't overstocking warehouses an effective solution for a problem of low availability? A) It does not speed product time to market. B) It is an inefficient use of raw materials. C) It increases sales costs. D) It increases inventory costs. E) It lowers fill rate. Answer: D Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Analytical thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 23) Which of the following traditional solutions enables manufacturers to deal with uncertainties in the supply chain? A) Safety stock B) Continuous replenishment C) Just-in-time strategies D) Demand planning E) Perfect information Answer: A Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Reflective thinking LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 24) A scheduling system for minimizing inventory by having components arrive exactly at the moment they are needed and finished goods shipped as soon as they leave the assembly line best describes a ________ strategy. A) just-in-time B) frictionless C) bullwhip D) safety-stock E) streamlined Answer: A Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 8 25) A distortion of information about the demand for a product as it passes from one entity to the next across the supply chain is called the ________ effect. A) network B) bullwhip C) ripple D) whirlpool E) diffraction Answer: B Difficulty: Easy AACSB: Application of knowledge LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? 26) Supply chain software can be classified as either supply chain ________ systems or supply chain ________ systems. A) push; pull B) demand; continual C) upstream; downstream D) planning; execution E) maintenance; development Answer: D Difficulty: Moderate AACSB: Information technology LO: 9-2: How do supply chain management systems c [Show More]

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