This course introduces students to the critical role of business processes and the enabling information technology in modern organizations. Over the last decade, companies have implemented enterprise systems to automate and integrate business processes and to connect the entire organization, including suppliers and customers, in a web-enabled computing environment. At the end of the course, students will understand

• the main business processes – supply-side, demand-side and support processes – and their integration within the firm as well as with customers and suppliers
• the principles and capabilities of state-of-the-art enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), suppy chain management systems (SCM), customer relationship management systems (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) systems
• the implications of alternative business strategies on business process design and the selection and configuration of enterprise systems

Students will develop the conceptual skills to translate business objectives and strategies into an appropriate business process design and to configure enterprise systems accordingly. In addition, students will gain hands-on-experiences with a commercially available enterprise system.

HEC Business Game is a Capstone Course for 3rd year students which allows them to review and apply the knowledge acquired during their studies in a serious game. In teams of four, students play as muesli cereal manufacturers with the following learning objectives:

• to define their company strategy,
• to operationalize their strategy by appropriate business decisions in the different functional areas (marketing, sales, production, procurement, finance, etc.),
• to defend their strategy in a dynamic market environment,
• to monitor and analyze performance based on their firm-specific Balanced Scorecard.

HEC Business Game uses ERPSim, a real-time simulation based on SAP’s ERP system, developped for pedagogical purposes by HEC Montréal. In 2012/13, UNIL’s “Fonds de l’Innovation Pédagogique” supports us to extend the course concept and introduce an additional investor role.

Companies face several challenges in IT planning and design: On the one hand, they wnat to leverage technology innovations (e.g., mobile technologies or cloud computing), which significantly change the way business applications are implemented and deployed. On the other hand, the complexity of corporate IT landscapes has been steadily growing, and keeping pace with an ever-changing business and technology environment is often difficult. In response, architectural considerations have become a key concern for today’s IT departments.

This course introduces students to the systematic planning and architecting of enterprise-wide, mission-critical, highly distributed information systems. It will provide the foundational knowledge needed for analyzing, modeling and designing information systems, based on enterprise architecture concepts. Upon completion, students will be able to

• understand the importance of architecture thinking in information systems planning and implementation,
• analyze and document an enterprise in its current and target state from an integrated business and technology perspective.
• systematically capture and model business requirements and translate them into appropriate architecture models describing the IT solutions.
• apply enterprise architecture concepts and practices for developing the application, data and integration architecture.

Students will apply their knowledge in case studies and modeling exercises. Guest lectures will provide in-depth insights into the approaches taken by leading companies. Case studies and guest lectures will cover examples from different industries (financial services, manufacturing, retail) and illustrate different architecture paradigms (packaged software vs. software development).