LECTURE NOTES ON

E-COMMERCE COURSE
CODE: CIT 4204

By
Dr. Kelvin K. Omieno
 Chapter-4
4.1 Enterprise Resource Planning:
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is business management software—usually a suite of
integrated applications—that a company can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from
many business activities, including:
Product planning, cost
Manufacturing or service delivery
Marketing and sales
Inventory management
Shipping and payment

❖
ERP provides an integrated view of core business processes, often in real-time, using
common databases maintained by a database management system. ERP systems track
business resources—cash, raw materials, production capacity—and the status of
business commitments: orders, purchase orders, and payroll. The applications that make
up the system share data across the various departments that provide the data. ERP
facilitates information flow between all business functions, and manages connections to
outside stakeholders.
❖
Enterprise system software is a multi-billion dollar industry that produces components
that support a variety of business functions. IT investments have become the largest
category of capital expenditure in United States-based businesses over the past decade.
Though early ERP systems focused on large enterprises, smaller enterprises
increasingly use ERP systems.
❖
The ERP system is considered a vital organizational tool because it integrates varied
organizational systems and facilitates error-free transactions and production. However,
ERP system development is different from traditional systems development.
ERP systems run on a variety of computer hardware and network configurations,
typically using a database as an information repository.

4.2 Functional areas of ERP:

An ERP system covers the following common functional areas. In many ERP systems these are
called and grouped together as ERP modules:
Financial accounting: General ledger, fixed asset, payables including vouchering,
matching and payment, receivables cash application and collections, cash management,
financial consolidation
Management accounting: Budgeting, costing, cost management, activity based costing
Human resources: Recruiting, training, rostering, payroll, benefits, 401K, diversity
management, retirement, separation
Manufacturing: Engineering, bill of materials, work orders, scheduling, capacity,
workflow management, quality control, manufacturing process, manufacturing projects,
manufacturing flow, product life cycle management
Order Processing: Order to cash, order entry, credit checking, pricing, available to
promise, inventory, shipping, sales analysis and reporting, sales commissioning.
Supply chain management: Supply chain planning, supplier scheduling, product
configurator, order to cash, purchasing, inventory, claim processing, warehousing
(receiving, putaway, picking and packing).
Project management: Project planning, resource planning, project costing, work
breakdown structure, billing, time and expense, performance units, activity management
Customer relationship management: Sales and marketing, commissions, service,
customer contact, call center support - CRM systems are not always considered part of
ERP systems but rather Business Support systems (BSS).
Data services : Various "self–service" interfaces for customers, suppliers and/or
employees.
4.3 Benefits of ERP:
ERP can improve quality and efficiency of the business. By keeping a company's internal
business processes running smoothly, ERP can lead to better outputs that may benefit the
company, such as in customer service and manufacturing.
ERP supports upper level management by providing information for decision making.
ERP creates a more agile company that adapts better to change. ERP makes a company
more flexible and less rigidly structured so organization components operate more
cohesively, enhancing the business—internally and externally.
ERP can improve data security. A common control system, such as the kind offered by
ERP systems, allows organizations the ability to more easily ensure key company data is
not compromised.
ERP provides increased opportunities for collaboration. Data takes many forms in the
modern enterprise. Documents, files, forms, audio and video, emails. Often, each data
medium has its own mechanism for allowing collaboration. ERP provides a collaborative
platform that lets employees spend more time collaborating on content rather than
mastering the learning curve of communicating in various formats across distributed
systems.
4.4 Disadvantages of ERP:
Customization can be problematic. Compared to the best-of-breed approach, ERP can be
seen as meeting an organization‘s lowest common denominator needs, forcing the
organization to find workarounds to meet unique demands.
Re-engineering business processes to fit the ERP system may damage competitiveness or
divert focus from other critical activities.
ERP can cost more than less integrated or less comprehensive solutions.
High ERP switching costs can increase the ERP vendor's negotiating power, which can
increase support, maintenance, and upgrade expenses.
Overcoming resistance to sharing sensitive information between departments can divert
management attention.
Integration of truly independent businesses can create unnecessary dependencies.
Extensive training requirements take resources from daily operations.
Due to ERP's architecture (OLTP, On-Line Transaction Processing) ERP systems are not
well suited for production planning and supply chain management (SCM).
Harmonization of ERP systems can be a mammoth task (especially for big companies)
and requires a lot of time, planning, and money.
4.5 Business Process Redesign:

It is a business management strategy focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and
business processes within an organization.
BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order
to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class
competitors.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the practice of rethinking and redesigning the
way work is done to better support an organization's mission and reduce costs.
Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic
goals, and customer needs.
Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering
focuses on the organization's business processes—the steps and procedures that govern
how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular
customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a
business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and
improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering
identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim
of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost,
quality, service, and speed.

Re-engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented

into subprocesses and tasks that are carried out by several specialized
functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall
performance of the entire process. Re-engineering maintains that optimizing the
performance of sub processes can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic
improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that
reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve
the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for
realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization's
work should be done distinguishes re-engineering from process improvement efforts that
focus on functional or incremental improvement.
 4.6 Knowledge Engineering:
Knowledge Engineering (KE) refers to all technical, scientific and social aspects involved in
building, maintaining and using knowledge-based systems.

There were essentially two approaches that were attempted:

1. Use conventional software development methodologies

2. Develop special methodologies tuned to the requirements of building expert systems

Many of the early expert systems were developed by large consulting and system integration
firms such as Andersen Consulting. These firms already had well tested conventional waterfall
methodologies (e.g. Method/1 for Andersen) that they trained all their staff in and that were
virtually always used to develop software for their clients. One trend in early expert systems
development was to simply apply these waterfall methods to expert systems development.

Another issue with using conventional methods to develop expert systems was that due to the
unprecedented nature of expert systems they were one of the first applications to adopt rapid
application development methods that feature iteration and prototyping as well as or instead of
detailed analysis and design. In the 1980s few conventional software methods supported this type
of approach.

The final issue with using conventional methods to develop expert systems was the need for
knowledge acquisition. Knowledge acquisition refers to the process of gathering expert
knowledge and capturing it in the form of rules and ontologies. Knowledge acquisition has
special requirements beyond the conventional specification process used to capture most
business requirements.

These issues led to the second approach to knowledge engineering: development of custom
methodologies specifically designed to build expert systems.[1] One of the first and most popular
of such methodologies custom designed for expert systems was the Knowledge Acquisition and
Documentation Structuring (KADS) methodology developed in Europe.
4.7 Business Modules In ERP:
The important modules in ERP are
➢
Finance:
❖
The entire concept of information technology is based on the premise that providing the
right information, to the right people, at the right timecan make a critical difference to the
organization.
❖
Much of this key information could be taken from the financial data. But merely having
the financial data is not enough.
❖
You need a set of processes and views of your data that provided up-to-the minute
financial information in exactly the form you need it to make that critical difference and
help with that critical decision.
❖
Accounting software needs access to information in each area of organisation, from R&D
and market research through manufacturing, distribution and sales.
❖
Financial solution must provide the management with information that can be leveraged
for strategic decisions, in order to achieve comprehensive advantage.
❖
In today‘s business enterprise, you need to know that your financial decisions are based
on today‘s data, not numbers from records closed a month ago, or even a week ago.And
you need to know that this same ‗today‘s‘ data represents every segment of your
organization's activities, whether your enterprise stretches across a room or around the
globe.
❖
This is essential, because the most efficient way to get our enterprise to where you want it
tomorrow is to know exactly where it is today.
❖
What ever be the financial goals of the organization, the financial application components
of the ERP solutions work hand-in-hand to improve the bottom line.
❖
The Finance modules of the most ERP systems provide financial functionality and
analysis
❖
support to thousands of businesses in many countries across the globe.

❖
These ERP systems include not only financial application components, but also Human
resources, Logistics, Business workflow and links to the internet.

❖
Financial Accounting has several sub systems. They are:
General Ledger
Accounts receivable and payable
Asset accounting
 Legal Consolidation
Controlling
➢
Investment Management:
❖
Investment Management provides extensive support for investment processes right
from planning through settlement.
❖
Investment management facilitates investment planning and budgeting at a level
higher than that needed for specific orders or projects.
❖
You can define an investment program hierarchy using any criteria-for
example department-wise.
❖
Investment program allows you to distribute budgets, which are used during the
capital spending process.
❖
Investment Management provides tools, enabling you to plan and manage your
capital spending projects right from the earliest stage
❖
Investment Management module recognizes the importance of the asset
accounting aspects of investment measures.
❖
The system automatically separates costs requiring capitalization from costs that are
not capitalized, debiting the correct costs to the asset under construction.
❖
Asset accounting provides precise proof of origin for all transactions
affecting acquisition and production costs.
➢
Plant Maintenance:
❖
The achievement of world class performance demands delivery of quality products
expeditiously and economically.Organizations simply cannot achieve excellence
with unreliable equipment.

❖
The attitude towards maintenance management has changed as a result of quick
response manufacturing, Just-intime reduction of work in process inventory and the
elimination of wasteful manufacturing practices.
❖
Machine breakdown and idle time for repair was once an accepted practice.
❖
Today when a machine breaks down, it can shut down the production line and
the customer‘s entire plant.
❖
The preventive Maintenance module provides an integrated solution for supporting
the operational needs of an enterprise-wide system.
❖
The plant Maintenance module include an entire family of products covering all aspects
of plant/equipment maintenance and becomes integral to the achievement of process
improvement.
❖
The major subsystems of a plant Maintenance module are:
 Preventive Maintenance Control
Equipment Tracking
Component Tracking
Plant Maintenance Calibration Tracking
Plant Maintenance Warranty Claims
Tracking
➢
Quality Management:
❖
The ISO9000 series of standards defines the functions of quality management and
the elements of a quality management system.
❖
The functions in the Quality Management module support the essential elements of such
a system. The other integrated modules in the system complement this functionality.
❖
The ISO standards require that quality management systems penetrate all processes
within an organization.
❖
The task priorities, according to the quality loop, shift form production (implementation
phase) to production planning and product development (planning phase) to procurement
and sales and distribution, as well as into the entire usage phase.
❖
Computer-integrated Quality Management (CIQ) is more appropriate term in comparison
to Computer-Aided Quality Management (CAQ), because an isolated CAQ system
cannot carry out the comprehensive tasks of a quality management system.

❖
The ERP system takes this into consideration by integrating the quality management
functions into the affected applications themselves ( for example, procurement,
warehouse, warehouse management, production and sales/distribution), instead of
delegating them to isolated CAQ systems.
❖
As a result of this approach, the processes described in the quality manual can be
implemented and automated in the electronic data processing (EDP) system.
❖
As a part of the Logistics applications, the Quality Management module handles
the traditional tasks of:
Quality planning
Quality inspection
Quality Control.
❖
For example, it support quality management in procurement, product verification, quality
documentation and in the processing of problems.
❖
The quality Management module‘s internal functions do not directly interact with the
data or processes of other modules.
The quality Management module fulfills the following functions:

➢
Quality planning ( Management of basic data for quality planning and inspection
planning, material specifications, Inspection planning).

➢
Quality Inspection ( Trigger inspections, Inspection processing with inspection plan
selection and sample calculation, print shop papers for sampling and inspection, Record
results and defects, Make the usage decision and trigger follow-up actions).

➢
Quality Control: (Dynamic sample determination on the basis of the quality level
history, Application of statistical process control techniques using quality control
charts.
❖
The Quality Management module uses the system‘s integration to link the tasks of quality
management with those of the other applications, such as materials management,
production, sales/distribution and cost accounting.

➢
Materials Management:
❖
The Material Management module optimizes all purchasing processes with workflow-
driven processing functions, enables automated supplier evaluations, lower procurement
and warehousing costs with accurate inventory and warehouse management and
integrates invoice verification.
❖
The main modules of the Material Management module are:
➢
Pre-purchasing Activities
➢
Purchasing
➢
Vendor Evaluation
➢
Inventory Management
➢
Invoice Verification and Material Inspection.

❖
The pre-purchasing activities include maintaining a service master database, in which the
descriptions of all services that are to be procured can be stored.
❖
Purchasing is a very important component of the Material Management module. It
supports all phases of material management: materials planning and control, purchasing,
goods receiving, inventory management and invoice verification.
❖
The vendor evaluation component has been completely integrated into the Material
management module. Information such as delivery dates, prices and quantities can be
taken from purchase orders. the continual monitoring of exiting supply relationships.
❖
Inventory Management system allows you to manage your stocks on a quantity and value
basis, plan, enter and check any goods movements and carry out physical inventory.
 ❖
Invoice Verification component is part of the material management system. It provides
the link between the material management components and the financial accounting,
controlling and asset accounting components.

4.8 ERP Market:

Some of the top-tier ERP vendors are
SAP-AG
BAAN
PeopleSoft
Oracle Corporation
J.D. Edwards

• Locally we have ABNO

These companies are covering the major ERP market revenue.

➢
SAP-AG:
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software; SAP delivers products and
services that help accelerate business innovation for their customers. Today, more than
82,000 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP applications – from distinct
solutions addressing the needs of small businesses and midsize companies to suite
offerings for global organizations.
SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related
applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, and
supplier relationship management
SAP AG was founded in 1972 by five German engineers with IBM in Mannheim,
Germany and is one of the top most ERP vendors providing the client server business
application solutions.
SAP serves as a standard in the industries like chemicals, customer products, oil & high
technology. The SAP group has offices in more than 50 countries worldwide & employs
a workforce of over 19300.
SAP‘s ERP package comes in 2 versions i.e. mainframe version (SAP R/2) & client
server version (SAP R/3).(R-Real)
With SAP, customers can install the core system & one or more of the fundamental
components, or purchase the software as a complete package.
SAP has developed extensive library of more than 800 predefined business processes.
 These processes may be selected from SAP library & can be included within installed
SAP application solution to suit the user exact requirements.
SAP software has special features like, linking a company‘s business processes &
applications, & supporting immediate responses to change throughout different
organizational levels & real time integration.
Also, the new technologies are available regularly to cop-up with the changes of the new
business trends.

• The international standards have been considered while designing the software like
support of multiple currencies simultaneously, automatically handles the country
specific import/export requirements
The modules of R/3 can be used individually as well as user can expand it in stages to
meet specific requirements.
➢
BAAN:
Baan company was founded in Netherlands in 1978 by brothers Jan and Paul Baan..
The BAAN Company is the leading global provider of enterprise business software.
The BAAN company products reduce complexity and cost, improve core business
processes, are faster to implement and use, are more flexible in adapting to business
changes.
The products offered by the company supports several business tools. The tools are based
on multi-tier architecture.
The BAAN products are having open component architecture.
The special feature of BAAN product is the use of BAAN DEM (Dynamic
Enterprise Modeling).
Baan DEM provides a business view via a graphical process/model based views.
BAAN products has multi-tiered architecture for maximum and flexible
configuration.
The application supports the new hardware, OS, networks and user interfaces w/o
any modification to the application code.
The Baan series based products include :
o BAAN Enterprise Resource Planning.
o BAAN Front Office.
o BAAN Corporate Office Solutions.
o BAAN Supply Chain Solutions.
 The main advantages of Baan series-based family of products are the best in class
components version independent integration and evergreen delivery.
BAAN ERP includes the following components –

Manufacturing Module:
This includes bills of material, cost price calculation, shop floor control, material
requirement planning, etc.
Finance Module:
This includes accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash management, fixed
assets, etc
Project Module:
This includes project budget, project definition, project estimation,project
planning, etc
Distribution Module: This includes sales management, purchase management
and warehouse management.
➢
Oracle Corporation:

Oracle Corporation was founded in the year 1977 and is the world‘s largest s/w company
and the leading supplier for enterprise information management.
This is the first s/w company to implement internet computing model for using the
enterprise s/w across the entire product line.
It provides databases and relational servers, application development, decision support
tools and enterprise business applications.
Oracle application consists of 45 plus software modules which are divided into following
categories
➢
Oracle Financials
➢
Oracle Human Resource
➢
Oracle Projects
➢
Oracle Manufacturing
➢
Oracle Supply Chain
➢
Oracle Front Office
❖
Oracle Financial:

– This application transforms a finance organization into a strategic force and also
helps to access the financial management functions.
– By working with these applications the companies can work globally, lower the
administrative cost & improve the cash management.

– It also provides strategic information to make timely & accurate decisions.

❖
Oracle Projects:

– These applications improve operational efficiency by providing an integrated

project management environment that supports the full lifecycle of a project and
increases the revenue growth and profitability.
❖
Oracle Supply Chain:

– This application manages the supply chain process by providing a single integrated
environment.
– It helps in effective partner collaboration & supply chain optimization capabilities.

– It helps in increasing market share while improving customer service & minimizing
the cost.
❖
Oracle Front Office:

– These applications provide a better understanding for customer relationships, their

values & profitability
– These applications increase top line revenues & maintain customer satisfaction &
retention
– It also helps to attract and retain profitable customers through deployment channels
including mobile & call centre.
❖
Oracle Human Resources:

– This application helps in managing the human resources which directly improve
profitability and contribute to competitive advantage

– It also helps in the ability to hire motivate & retain the most capable working force
and also helps in providing comprehensive and up-to-date information.
❖
Oracle Manufacturing:

– Oracle manufacturing application enables the companies to achieve market

leadership by becoming more customer responsive & efficient.

– This module also supports the companies to increase revenue, profitability &
 customer loyalty by capturing the demand & planning the manufacturing
process in an efficient way.
➢
People Soft:
PeopleSoft Inc. was established in 1987 to provide innovative software solutions that
meet the changing business demands of enterprises worldwide.
It employs more than 7000 people worldwide. & the annual revenue for the year 1998
was $ 1.3 million.
PeopleSoft‘s mission is to provide innovative software solutions that meet the changing
business demands of organizations worldwide.
PeopleSoft develops markets and supports enterprise-wide software solutions to handle
core business functions including human resources management, accounting and control,
project management, treasury management performance measurement and supply chain
management.
PeopleSoft provides industry-specific enterprise solutions to customers in select markets,
including communications, finance services, healthcare, manufacturing.
PeopleSoft products support clients running, Microsoft Windows and popular Web
browsers, as well as a range of mainframe, midrange and LAN relational database server
platforms.
PeopleSoft solutions run on a variety of leading hardware and database platforms,
including Compaq, Hewlet-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Informix, Microsoft SQL
Server, Sybase, DB2 and others.
PeopleSoft delivers Web-enabled applications, workflow, online analytical processing
(OLAP) etc.
• The PeopleSoft application serves the whole business management solutions, commercial
solutions & industry solutions.

The PeopleSoft‘s business management solutions are in the areas given below:-
– Human Resources Management
– Accounting and Control
– Treasury Management
– Performance Measurement
– Project Management
– Sales and Logistics
– Materials Management
 – Supply Chain Planning
– Service Revenue Management
– Procurement
➢
JD Edwards:
On March 17, 1977 J.D. Edwards was formed, by Jack Thompson, Dan Gregery &
Ed-Mc Vaney.
In early years J.D. Edwards designed software for small & medium sized computers.
In 1980‘s it focused on IBM system/38.
As the company began to out grow, its headquarter in Denver, opened branch offices in
Dallas & Newport Beach, California, Houston, San Francisco & Bakenfield. And then
internationally expanded its Europe headquarters in Brussels & Belgium.
As it grew it became obvious that servicing a large number of customers was creating
a challenge
By the mid of 1980‘s, J.D Edwards was being recognizes as an Industry-leading
supplier of application software for the highly successful IBM AS/400 computer.
Today J.D Edwards is a publicly traded company that has more than 4700 customers with
sites in over 100 countries & more than 4200 employees. J.D Edwards emphasizes on the
following three matters:

❖
Solution: JD Edwards offers a balance of technology & service options tailored by
the unique industry & its processes. This allows JD Edward to ensure timely
implementation & outgoing quality of the solution.
❖
Relationships: With JD Edwards, you have a partner committed to ushering you
through changes in the business & technology.
❖
Value: JD Edwards provides with an appreciating software asset – one with the
potential to increase in value over the lift of your business.

JD Edwards is a leading provider of integrated software for distribution, human resource,

finance, manufacturing & SCM.

These software's are operated in multiple computing environments & also JAVA &
HTML enabled.
4.9 Enterprise application integration (EAI):
❖
Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the use of software and computer systems'
architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.
Enterprise application integration is the process of linking such applications within a
single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the
greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping
changes to the existing applications or data structures. Applications can be linked either
at the back-end (database) or the front-end (GUI).

The various systems that need to be linked together may reside on different operating
systems, use different database solutions or computer languages, or different date and
time formats, or may be legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor who
originally created them. In some cases, such systems are dubbed "stovepipe systems"
because they consist of components that have been jammed together in a way that makes
it very hard to modify them in any way.

EAI can be used for different purposes:

Data integration: Ensures that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is
also known as enterprise information integration (EII).

Vendor independence: Extracts business policies or rules from applications and

implements them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is
replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-
implemented.

Common facade: An EAI system can front-end a cluster of applications, providing a

single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to
learn to use different software packages.

Multiple technologies are used in implementing each of the components of the EAI system:

i. Bus/hub:

This is usually implemented by enhancing standard middleware products (application server,

message bus) or implemented as a stand-alone program (i. e., does not use any middleware),
acting as its own middleware.
 ii. Application connectivity:

The bus/hub connects to applications through a set of adapters (also referred to as connectors).
These are programs that know how to interact with an underlying business application. The
adapter performs two-way communication, performing requests from the hub against the
application, and notifying the hub when an event of interest occurs in the application (a new
record inserted, a transaction completed, etc.). Adapters can be specific to an application (e. g.,
built against the application vendor's client libraries) or specific to a class of applications (e. g.,
can interact with any application through a standard communication protocol, such as SOAP,
SMTP or Action Message Format (AMF)). The adapter could reside in the same process space as
the bus/hub or execute in a remote location and interact with the hub/bus through industry
standard protocols such as message queues, web services, or even use a proprietary protocol. In
the Java world, standards such as JCA allow adapters to be created in a vendor-neutral manner.

iii. Data format and transformation:

To avoid every adapter having to convert data to/from every other applications' formats, EAI
systems usually stipulate an application-independent (or common) data format. The EAI system
usually provides a data transformation service as well to help convert between application-
specific and common formats. This is done in two steps: the adapter converts information from
the application's format to the bus's common format. Then, semantic transformations are applied
on this (converting zip codes to city names, splitting/merging objects from one application into
objects in the other applications, and so on).

iv. Integration modules:

An EAI system could be participating in multiple concurrent integration operations at any given
time, each type of integration being processed by a different integration module. Integration
modules subscribe to events of specific types and process notifications that they receive when
these events occur. These modules could be implemented in different ways: on Java-based EAI
systems, these could be web applications or EJBs or even POJOs that conform to the EAI
system's specifications.

V. Support for transactions:

When used for process integration, the EAI system also provides transactional consistency across
applications by executing all integration operations across all applications in a single overarching
distributed transaction (using two-phase commit protocols or compensating transactions).
Disadvantages of EAI:

1. Constant change: The very nature of EAI is dynamic and requires dynamic project
managers to manage their implementation.
2. Shortage of EAI experts: EAI requires knowledge of many issues and technical aspects.
3. Competing standards: Within the EAI field, the paradox is that EAI standards themselves
are not universal.
4. EAI is a tool paradigm: EAI is not a tool, but rather a system and should be implemented
as such.
5. Building interfaces is an art: Engineering the solution is not sufficient. Solutions need to
be negotiated with user departments to reach a common consensus on the final outcome.
A lack of consensus on interface designs leads to excessive effort to map between various
systems data requirements.

6. Loss of detail: Information that seemed unimportant at an earlier stage may become
crucial later.
7. Accountability: Since so many departments have many conflicting requirements, there
should be clear accountability for the system's final structure.