Enterprise Systems

Last class we began talking about Enterprise Systems and the move to having a common database architecture for all (or most) applications used in an company. This really was quite interesting to me because at my last job one of my last projects was getting human resources data from multiple data sources to merge into one database. I worked on this project for an employer who had hundreds of thousands of employees and retirees that in many cases became part of the company as a result of acquisitions. Due to the sheer size of the employee workforce and the complexity of all of the different rules that applied to the different employee populations managing all of them in a database was extremely difficult. As a result of this complexity most of the work in estimating the costs of employee benefits was handled in Microsoft Excel. The trade off with using Excel for analysis because of complexity was that it took much more time to do almost any time of analysis.