Analysis and design of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Sales Business Function Area

Enterprise Resource Planning can provide many benefits for organizations that use them. This also holds for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). However, due to limited funds, SMEs is unable to procure a commercial ERP system. Nevertheless, even for a free ERP system, SMEs do not have the expertise in dealing with the hardware, software, nor ERP system infrastructure. Therefore, we are interested to perform analysis and design of an ERP system for SMEs that is free, able to be implemented and maintained easily by SMEs. However, in this research, we constrain ourselves to focus only on one of the main business function areas namely the Sales Area. First, we perform analysis on SMEs' business processesusing interviews to 17 SMEs in Jakarta to create generic business process model for the corresponding area. We also use additional references, i.e., analysis on two open-source ERP software packages, viz. Openbravo and Apache OF Biz. Based on the analysis, we further try to build the design of the ERP system. In the end, this research yields a generic process model of the ERP system for SMEs in the Sales Business Function Area and the corresponding Use Case Diagram (UCD), Class Diagram, Entity Relationship Diagram(ERD) and Architectural Deployment Diagram.