After finishing your studies at EU, you and 2 partners decided to create a business. Since then it has grown both in turnover (this year it will exceed $1500000) and employees - there are now 6 employees in the company, giving a headcount of 9. The company is a service company, providing consultancy and project management services to other companies and public bodies.

For the next 3-4 years you anticipate turnover growth of at least 15-20% p.a. The company will only add only 2 or 3 more people in terms of headcount in the next 2 years.

The software used in the company is MS Office and Project. Until now, the person responsible for the accounts used standard accountancy software, as well as the MS Office package used by the rest of the company. Other than some MS Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, there is no company-wide software. The system has worked satisfactorily until now, but you feel that as the company takes on larger projects, you would like to implement a simple, easy to install, easy to use, affordable ERP.

The company does not plan to manufacture anything; therefore this part of the application is not essential.

Since you do not plan to expand in terms of number of employees, you choose not to run with a large, expensive package such as SAP or Oracle, but choose a product suitable for small and medium businesses. It can either be purchased and installed outright, or used on an ASP (software-as-a-service) basis.

You anticipate a maximum of 10 concurrent users. For the purposes of this exercise disregard hardware and networking requirements. There is no integration required with any other system.

The deliverable for this project is a short presentation recommending a suitable software. It should include the name of the software, why you have chosen it, why you think it will help the business work better, and if possible, an estimation of the cost and the installation time (only if this information can be easily found on the website).

This assignment should be done by web research - using information available on web sites. I do not expect you to register with any software provider.

Avoid just cutting and pasting the marketing copy found on the homepage of software sites - it is usually very generic, paints an excessively optimistic picture and provides little real information. But you should be able to explore the site to find descriptions of the product features, etc. Try and put yourselves in the situation of the company and explain why the software in question might be suitable. (You may invent any data that is not given about your company!)

The whole process of purchasing an ERP is very long and complicated. It takes companies weeks or, more normally, months. What I am asking you to do here is a brief, very simplified task. The aim is to make you aware of the complexity of the process, and to make you undertake simple internet research into software vendor sites.

The deliverable for this piece of work is a 5 minute presentation (approx.), to be delivered on the final day of class.

The work can be done alone or in groups of 2 or 3 people. Please state clearly the names of all group members.