Design And Implementation Of A Distributed Recruitment Management System

2.3.1.2    Management Reporting System
We cannot talk about a management reporting system without discussing a Management Information System. Dr Prince Chris Udochukwu in his journal article titled “Establishing and managing Management Information Systems in developing countries” describes a management information system as how establishments achieve utmost satisfaction from investment in personnel, equipment and business processes. MIS is people oriented, it emphasises service although it is more often than not built on computer hardware, software and networks it is not compulsorily computer based Management Information Systems do not have to include electronic equipment (E.OZ, 2002).MIS differ from other information systems in that they are used to analyse and facilitate strategic and operational activities.
A management reporting system is a type of management information system it is essentially a mechanism for monitoring the missions of an organization In a formal plan it is defined in terms of three distinct streams namely:
. The desired organization structure
. The time phased statement of organizational goals
. The critical variables of success
If the formal plan is imprecise or inadequate, failing to take into account the actuality of the real life situation, the system in its entirety becomes open ended and in-effective hence designers must take such constraints into consideration when designing the system. (B.Stanford 2003) In earlier times the equity system was used for management reporting but this system had many flaws the biggest of which was data inconsistency this led to the creation of a new reporting system called Management Reporting System (P.Mohan, 2000).
2.3.1.3    Enterprise Resource Planning Systems
An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is an information system that supports the core business processes of an organization for example, human resource management, sales, marketing, management, financial accounting, controlling, and logistics. In the past, each of this business process was encapsulated in a separate information system. Most of these business processes use related data thus resulting in much redundant data being stored within the respective information systems. The increasing number and complexity of information systems forced organizations to spend much effort in synchronizing the data of all information systems. An ERP system is a solution created to overcome these synchronization efforts by integrating different information systems. It is a software system built using a distributed computing platform including one or more database management systems. The computing platform serves as an infrastructure on which the individual business processes are implemented. ERP systems run typically in a three-tier client/server architecture consisting of a presentation tier/user interface, an application server tier, and a database server tier. ERP systems provide multiple instances of a database management, configuration management, and version management for the underlying database schema, the user interface, and for the many application programs associated with them. The market leader in the ERP market is SAP, with 43,000 customers for its system SAP ERP (as at 2009). Other important vendors are Oracle, Sage Company, and Microsoft.
2.3.1.4    Business Intelligence Systems
A business intelligence system provides tools to analyse the performance—that is, the efficiency and the effectiveness—of running business processes. These tools extract information on the business processes from the data available in an organization. Different tools and techniques exist, among them business performance management, business activity monitoring, querying and reporting, data mining, and process mining.
Business performance management concentrates on improving the performance of business processes. The goal is to extract information from the history of running business processes and to display this information on a management dashboard. For example, one could monitor a credit approval process to get insight into the length of time required to make the decision. In contrast to business performance management, business activity monitoring aims at providing real-time information on business processes and the activities in these business processes. The goal is to support decision making at runtime. Such a tool may monitor inventory levels, response times, or queues and take action whenever needed. Querying and reporting tools explore data (e.g., stored in a data warehouse) to provide insight into efficiency and effectiveness of business processes and trends in the environment. Typically, statistical analysis is applied to the data to distinguish between trends and isolated events. The term data mining refers to a collection of techniques to extract patterns from examples. Originally, the term “data mining” had a negative connotation (i.e., data dredging, data snooping, and data fishing), but nowadays data mining is an established research domain with a huge impact. Examples of classical data mining tasks are classification (which arranges the data into predefined groups), clustering (like classification, but the groups are not predefined), regression (which attempts to find a function that models the data with the least error), and association rule learning (which searches for relationships between variables). Data mining techniques can be applied to any
Type of data and do not explicitly consider business processes. Process mining looks at data from the viewpoint of a particular business process. Information systems usually log the occurrences of events—for example, accepting an order, sending an invoice, or receiving a payment. The availability of such event logs, which contain footprints of a business process, enables the discovery of models describing reality. The resulting business process model can be compared with the specification of the business process and used for simulation and performance analysis. Business intelligence is still a young discipline that will receive more acceptance and attention soon. Most commercial tools support business performance management, business activity monitoring, and querying and reporting rather than the more sophisticated techniques of data and process mining. Business intelligence is so far restricted to reporting information on running business processes and offers little support in terms of how a business process can be improved (Witten and Frank 2005) (Aalst, Reijers, et al. 2007).