Designing and developing monitoring agents for ERP systems

This work discusses the case study of a bus company that needs to evolve its ERP system to enhance the managerial strategic control over the maintenance process of the bus fleet. This maintenance process was initially characterized by a poor performance that caused the low quality of the final service to the customer. The solution to the problem, we discuss in this article, is the integration of monitoring agents, called Probes, into the ERP system. Probes enable to control the process performance aligning it to the company’s strategic goals. Probes offer a real time monitoring of the strategic goals achievement, also increasing the understanding of the maintenance activities. At the end, the use of Probes in the ERP system of the company has determined a significant change in the strategy of the company that obtained higher performances of the maintenance process and consequentially a higher quality of the offered service.