A Cloudbased Solution to a Company - Essay Example

The ‘We Are Automobile’ company deals with the trade of spare parts products to the motor industry and its representatives are often going to potential customers’ premises to sell their products. Currently, the company does not have an Information Technology department and there is no IT system implemented. Therefore, the company processes the customers’ requests manually and stores all the information on relative registers. The company is facing many problems due to manual work and inconvenience for storing and accessing information from the premises of the customer.

Keeping in view the problem, the company has decided to implement an Information Technology solution. There are two possible IT solutions for solving the problems of the company including implementation of traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the Cloud Computing. The document also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both of h solutions along with recommendations for the company to implementation of one of the two technologies. Keeping in view the company’s background and analysis of both solutions, the document reveals that Cloud Computing has more advantages over the traditional ERP. Further, the document presents a technical approach and project management to implement the proposed solution (Alley, 2010).

Information Technology Solutions

As mentioned above, there are two IT solutions to solve the problems of the company, ERP implementation, and Cloud Computing.

“A system designed to support and automate the business processes of medium and large businesses. It provides an enterprise-wide solution for all business activities with a single application and single data repository” (Mutt, 2010).

A comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution may be developed to solve the problems and fulfil the requirements of the company. Usually, the modules of ERP include Finance & Accounting, Customer Relationship Management, Human Resources Management, Payroll, Inventory & Procurement, Sales, and Project Management. The ERP is a complete solution that can provide services to the company and make the company ICT-enabled.

The second possible IT solution is Cloud Computing which provides hosted services over the Internet. There are mainly three categories of this service: software has a service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service. Furthermore, the cloud services can be differentiated the traditional hosting through many features/characteristics; however, the main three diverse features include: the consumer/customer just need to pay all the maintenance/services are managed by the service provider, customer can take services according to requirement (little or full), and the services are provided on demand by hours, days, weeks, etc. (Rouse, 2010). 

Comparison of Traditional System Vs Cloud Computing

A comparison of both Information Technology solutions the traditional system and Cloud Computing has been given below (Metal Center News, 2011):

S. #

Traditional System

Cloud Computing

1.

On-site or traditional ERP systems have constraints in managing particular Supply Chain tasks that include: inventory accessibility, readability, and order information synchronization at customers’ places

ERP based on cloud computing does not have such constraints as the application can be accessed from anywhere the internet is available; therefore, the order entry can be made from the customers’ place.

2.

The traditional system also lacks traceability of material is due to the unavailability of the system at customer locations. In this regard, the manual official procedure is frequently completed later, however, the items physically reach their ultimate location before the manual work, and hence, specifications of the items have to be entered manually.

Cloud putting has eliminated the constraint of paperwork at the customers’ place information from the oner can be added and updated from anywhere. In this regard, the problem of traceability has been removed from computing from imputing services.

3.

On-site systems require the development of software applications along with the procurement of all required infrastructure to execute the applications.

In the case of the cloud, the customers neither require the development of soft applications nor infrastructure to deploy the applications; however, the customers have to have a computer or laptop and an internet connection to avail of the required services.

4.

On-premise systems have to be maintained regularly and also hathe ve need upgrading and updating patches along with amendments to manage the certain revolutions in the company.

As the software application is deployed at the vendor premises and the vendor has the ownership of the software application, therefore, the customers do not require upgrading or maintaining the software application.

            From the above comparison of the traditional system with the cloud computing environment, it can be said that the problems of the ‘We Are Automobile’ company can only be solved by adopting cloud computing. As the problem of accessing the system from their customer’s place, it can be solved by cloud computing as it does not require access only from the deployment site. Furthermore, as the ‘We Are Automobile’ company does not have any IT department, therefore, it is convenient for them to adopt cloud computing as it does not require any human resources or IT department for maintenance of software. The advantages of cloud computing are not limited to the above, but it can also be cost-effective and available within no time as compared to the traditional system, as it provides the software applications, the infrastructure, and the platform required for the deployment of software applications. Hence, all categories (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) of cloud computing can be utilized to get the above benefits and to solve the company’s problem (Suite, 2011).