Moore\'s Law and ERP Systems

Moore's Law and ERP Systems

Briefly describe Moore's Law. What are the implications of this? Are there any practical limitations to Moore's Law?

Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, is credited with the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years (Intel) while at the same time the cost per component drops. Central to Moore's Law is higher-density circuitry producible at a lower cost.

Gordon Moore made that prediction in 1965, and since then Moore's Law has been proven accurate for many technological areas including disk storage, Random Access Memory (RAM), microprocessors, and even telecommunications bandwidth.

There are commercial and technological implications of Moore's Law that companies specifically in high technology-related industries need to plan for and capitalize on. Foremost of these is the need for planning product strategies to capitalize on and make the most use of Moore's Law from a development and product introduction strategy standpoint. Companies who compete in industries where Moore's Law dominates product development schedules and timelines, as is the case in cellular phones, PDAs, personal computers, telecommunications products, and other circuit-intensive products, it is best to be preemptive with product timing. In essence this forces high tech companies to seek how best to obsolete their current products so the following product generation will succeed. Due to Moore's Law having a direct impact on a company's product lifecycles, there is also a direct influence on their revenues, costs, and profits. Moore's Law in effect can define the profitability trends of entire industries, and it does this today in microprocessors, memory, mass storage and telecommunications, in addition to many others. The limitations of Moore's Law, from a practicality standpoint, are limited by the physical attributes of the substrate or foundational materials being used, in addition to the density of circuits and the ability to dissipate their heat. The practical limitations also have to do with the underlying managing of logic from an increasingly more dense packing of circuits on a single surface mount, as would be the case in the development of an integrated circuit.

How can application software improve the effectiveness of a large enterprise? What are some of the benefits associated with implementation of an enterprise resource planning system? What are some of the issues that could keep the use of enterprise resource planning software from being successful?

The greatest benefits of enterprise software are in first creating a higher level of integration across the many departments that comprise an organization. This includes Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Supplier Management, Procurement, Manufacturing, Fulfillment, and Services. The ability to synchronize all these departments' processes in pursuit of a commons strategic objective is where enterprise software is making its most major impact. Specifically in the area of making processes more efficient across these departments in the service of customers on the one hand, and making supply chains more transparent on the other, are the two most critical strategic areas where enterprise software is making its most significant contribution to companies today.