Enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management systems, help companies reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase operational efficiency via integrating data and processes and refining organizations through advanced information technologies. Many companies choose to purchase large-scale software applications off the shelf instead of developing the applications inhouse. That way, the companies can benefit from the standardization of purchased solutions and technological innovations offered by solution providers. At the same time, other approaches to installing and implementing enterprise information systems occur in practice as well....[ Read more ]

Enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management systems, help companies reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase operational efficiency via integrating data and processes and refining organizations through advanced information technologies. Many companies choose to purchase large-scale software applications off the shelf instead of developing the applications inhouse. That way, the companies can benefit from the standardization of purchased solutions and technological innovations offered by solution providers. At the same time, other approaches to installing and implementing enterprise information systems occur in practice as well.

In this thesis, we study three operations models related to enterprise information systems. We first study the relationship between the ERP adoption and the operational performance. Specifically, we examine empirically the impact of ERP adoption on firms’ performance including costs and inventories. Based on the business data from Chinese exchange market, we find that many firms have implemented EPR systems for a time and have already achieved some improvements. Our study provides empirical evidences of the impact of ERP systems and firms’ performance.

We then propose and study a two-stage software development model. In the first stage, a solution provider designs a standardized product. In the second stage, for some customers who demand for extra functionality, customization will be carried out to fulfill their respective needs. The main decision making for the solution provider is the design level (in terms of functionality) of the standardized product. That is, the more comprehensive the design of the standardized product, the less likely demands for further customization, but of course, the more the efforts put into the first stage. Our analysis makes the tradeoff in the decision making transparent.

We finally model and analyze a new method of providing software services called software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaS is a service model by which a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either by itself or through a third party) the application for usage over the Internet. This concept is very attractive to users because it offers much flexibility in vendor selection and reduces or even removes users’ workload in maintaining/upgrading the software. To gain managerial insights into this growing business, we study the cost and revenue structure as well as the decision process from the perspective of a SaaS provider. In particular, we consider a finite planning horizon in which the provider decides on the service quality offered in each time period. We demonstrate that a list quality policy is optimal and then extend the analysis to an infinite horizon problem and to the case with the consideration of customers’ perception.