Waterfall Methodology

Waterfall is the first methodology founded for the systems development life cycle. Also, it is called classic and traditional approach. It was established in 1970 by Winston W. Royce. It is about a sequential phase which used in the software developer processes, it called waterfall because the phases are flowing steadily downwards like the waterfall, and these phases are: requirement, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance. However, like any model, Waterfall has its pros and cons. First pros, it’s considered to be the simplest and the easiest model because it is easy to manage. Second, each stage has specific deliverables plus review processes in the same time. Moreover, the stages are well organized, and each step has a start date and finish date. Plus, testing is applied in every stage. Additionally, waterfall is the best option for small projects with clear requirements. Also, it is good for the large systems because it provides a lot of details. Furthermore, a well-organized documentation is provided by waterfall which is very important to move from each stage. Back to the waterfall cons, there will be a lot of budget and effort for writing the documentation after each stage. Waterfall is not flexible on responding to any changes that happen between stages. In addition, it is sometimes costly to be implemented. Further, when the customer tests the system and represent a feedback, these feedbacks will be difficult to contain into the project. Another issue is that when developers face problems they left it to the end to solve it and also does not allow for much revision.

Utilizing Social Media in SMEs

Social Media is a new phenomenon to offer great opportunities for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to promote their products and services and increase communication with their suppliers and their customers. It is also an excellent way to keep abreast of their competitors and gaining new customers. Social media is the social interaction among people in which they create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. Nowadays, the use of social media tools increased significantly. In result, both businesses and consumers are using the media to share information, exchange opinions and recommendations and display certain consumption behavior. At the beginning there were few tools appear in a social media like Google, discussion forums, YouTube and Facebook. The uses of these tools were very simple. Recently, new features were added to the previous tools and new tools were appears such as, Instagram, twitter and LinkedIn. However, once the SMEs realize that they have to expand their business scope, enhance efficiency, and strengthen and consolidate its relationship with its customers and vendors, they found that social media is the best way. Since the use of social media help the SMEs in multiple ways. For example, the way of exchanging information is easier and faster, the customers are more accessible, the time of marketing is decreased, generate opportunities to come up with new products and services and many additional benefits of utilizing social media.

ERP Advantages and Risks

ERP is abbreviation of enterprise resources planning. It is software to integrate all the company’s departments with its needs and functions into a single computer system. It allows integrating and automating the majority of the company business process like product planning, purchase, controlling the product, inventory control, interaction with suppliers and customers, delivering the service to customer and keeping orders in track. Additionally, ERP provide reliable information to the decision makers at the time they need it. ERP market has increased with the last few years and it is rate still growing. Many companies have shift their management system into EPR because they realize its advantages in term of reducing the cost, increasing the inventory turns and accuracy rate, improving customer service and response to customer will be faster. Moreover, there will be reduction in a paper work and setup times. Using ERP enable to gather a customer data. So, the company will have customer database usable by all applications. All in all, ERP leads to high quality work. Like most of famous applications, ERP has risks. There was 70% of all ERP projects fail to be fully implemented, despite the high cost of the software and the length of time that taken in the implementation stage. Furthermore, 50% of companies said it was hard to make changes in ERP to meet the business requirements.