Advanced Financial Information Systems

Code 2156 (7.5 ECTS credits), Autumn 2003

Aim and structure

This course is intended to provide a thorough understanding of how financial information systems, ERP systems, and SCM systems are implemented and utilized in companies. Particular emphasis is placed on learning not only what functions the systems provide, but also understanding their technological structure and the linkages with business strategy. A significant amount of hands-on use and development of prototype systems forms part of the learning experience.

The course is built around lectures, short class cases, computer workshops, a company case, and literature. Please see below for descriptions of the different elements of the course. For a brief overview of the general philosophy of this course - what we teach and how and why - kindly see the "About the program" part of the letter that went out to students accepted to the Program in Advanced Financial Information Systems in the summer.

Structurally, the course contains two parts. The first one, comprising lectures 01-10, workshops 1-3, and the literature specified under "Part I" below, serves as an introduction to the field of financial information systems, and to the basic tools we will be using. There's nothing particularly advanced about this part, but because of the very different background and experience of the students attending this course, we must begin with an introduction or refresher. The second part, comprising lectures 11-28, workshops 4-7, and the literature listed under "Part II" below, deals with the functions and technology of advanced financial information systems in more depth. It is possible to view the second part as subdivided into two sections. The first of these is structured around lectures 11-18 and workshops 4-5, and deals with reporting, cost management and sales. The second subpart, comprising lectures 19-28 and workshops 6-7, contains material on inventories, logistics, and production control.

Part I and part II overlap a little bit with respect to the topic of ERP systems, and indeed one might view lecture 09-10 as belonging to both parts, or bridging them.

The course 2157 Strategic Financial Information Systems, which is given in the spring, continues directly from this course and deals with more advanced topics, data warehousing and data mining, and XML-based systems.

Prerequisites

In order to attend this course, you either have to be a student in the Program in Advanced Financial Information Systems, or be accepted individually as a participant by the examiner. Reasonably senior accounting, information systems, and PIB exchange students will generally be accepted as long as there is space available, but do please contact the examiner first.

Lectures

There are 14 pairs of 90-minute lectures scheduled, always in classroom 210 (at the end of the corridor where the study office is) on Monday afternoons. The aim of these is to, as far as possible, tell you stuff that you need to know that isn't in the textbooks.

Attendance is voluntary, but do bear in mind that the exams will draw on both the literature and the lectures, and that, really, as far as possible the lectures aim to complement and extend, not overlap, the material in the books.

Guest lectures may be added – watch your mail!

Class cases

In order to tie the lectures together, and make them concrete, they will, starting with the second pair, include a small case-like assignment from week to week. These cases will vary in form, content, length, everything, but they will always be introduced at the end of a weekly lecture, and discussed at the beginning of next week's lectures. Sometimes they will consist of a research paper or professional article to read and think about. Occasionally they might be a set of web pages to explore. They might be HBS-type actual cases; they might very occasionally be end-of-chapter-type exercises; they might be anything, really. But you'll get them, and the instructions, at the end of a lecture on the subject; you will then have a week to reflect on the material, and then we'll get back to the material before going on with the next lecture topic.

Workshops

A major part of the learning process in this course consists of the hands-on experience of exploring, designing and building representative pieces and modules of progressively more advanced financial information systems. This is organized as a series of seven computer workshops.

The workshops are all structured in a similar manner. The topic, the assignment and support material, and the technical issues will be introduced during the second of that week's Monday afternoon lectures. On Wednesday afternoons you will be assisted in getting started with the topic in the computer lab. You will do the main part of the work according to your own schedule, and submit your deliverable, as directed, in the form of web pages on the server. Except for the first workshop, it is permitted and strongly recommended that you do the workshops in groups of two people - as long as you never do more than one workshop with the same partner!

The first workshop is different from the rest. The deliverable is a - your - initial home page on the PAFIS web server, and the main objective is simply to get you all set up and familiar with the computer system we'll be using throughout the course and program. This workshop is not graded.

The remaining six workshops will then introduce different aspects and functions of financial information systems. In most cases, you will be required to find out and document how these functions are done in representative commercial software products, and also to build a web-based prototype application in order to gain a deeper insight into how these things work. The main tools you will be using are PHP, a server-side scripting language, and the Postgres (and IBM DB2, if you like) relational database management systems. As a side effect of this, you will, at the end of the course, find that you have become a reasonably proficient developer of web-based database applications. But this is just incidental. In practice, workshops 2 and 3 are still quite heavily focused on introducing the tools we need - the PHP language and relational databases, respectively.

Attendance in class is nominally voluntary. This means we do not keep track, but you will find it difficult bordering on impossible to complete the deliverables unless you show up when we explain how to do it, and assist you with getting started.

Programming lectures

Complementing the regular Monday afternoon lectures and the workshops, there will be a series of 14 lectures and demonstrations, mostly on Wednesday evenings, almost every week during the term. These lectures focus on the purely practical programming aspects of constructing web pages, server and client side scripts, and databases. As little theory as possible will be introduced. Attendance is totally voluntary, and the exams will not require you to know the stuff that is dealt with in these lectures. However, based on the experience of the previous two courses, they should be of moderate to great help in enabling you to cope with the workshops in a more efficient manner. Also, programming can be quite entertaining - every year we have a few persons discovering that they actually like to program computers! Consequently, we do go a little beyond what is required or immediately useful for the workshops. We will, for instance, introduce the more powerful IBM DB2 database system, and the JavaScript browser language.

Please note that these lectures are targeted squarely at students who do not have a background as computer programmers.

Company case

Aside from lectures, books, and workshops, we consider that it would be useful for you – to put it mildly – to visit a real-world company and have a look at how their financial information system hangs together. This is best done in reasonably small groups of 4-6 people, and of course the idea is that the groups will share and compare their findings from the different companies. Consequently, each group will write a report – submitted, naturally, as a web page – and give a short presentation of their company case. More information and detailed instructions will be given when the company case project is introduced in lecture 06.

Literature

The literature is divided into two parts:

Part I:

• Jones & Rama: Accounting Information Systems - A Business Process Approach (South-Western, 2003)

  • Publisher's pages
  • Book site
  • Hanken library record

  Please read this book except for chapter 3 (pp. 67-122), chapter 4 (pp. 123-182), chapter 5 part 3 (pp. 205-220), and part IV (pp. 595-). This leaves about 465 pages, gross, out of which end-of-chapter exercises, which you do not need to read, account for about 30%. This leaves a net of about 325 pages to read.

• Readings & assigned material.

Part II:

• O'Leary: Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Systems, Life Cycle, Electronic Commerce, and Risk (Cambridge University Press 2000)

  • Publisher's pages
  • Hanken library record
  • Online Ebrary version (requires ebrary reader software, only accessible from inside the Hanken local area network)

• Knolmayer, Mertens & Zeier: Supply Chain Management Based on SAP Systems: Order Management in Manufacturing Companies (Springer 2002)

  • Publisher's pages
  • Hanken library record

  Please read chapters 1-5 (pp. 1-196).

• Readings & assigned material.

Schedule

Sa 13.12.2003 Exam part I and/or II
Sa 17.1.2004 Exam part I and/or II
Sa 21.2.2004 Exam part I and/or II

Please note that the schedule is subject to changes and extensions.

The three examinations after the lectures have passed are standard exam dates, supervised by the study office for a lot of courses on the same day. You need to register in advance for these, using the school's web-based system. The examination on October 17th is arranged internally for this particular course, and you do not need to register for this one. Just show up.

Examination and grading

The course will be graded based on written examinations, project work, and computer exercises.

The literature and contents of the lectures will be examined in two parts. The examination for the first part, comprising the literature specified under "Part I" above, assigned readings and material, and the contents of lectures 1-10 and workshops 1-3, will be worth 20 points. You need to get at least 10 points in order to pass. There will be an opportunity to take the examination for this part on Friday, October 17th, and then three exam opportunities after the lecture period when you can take either or both of the parts.

The examination for the second part,comprising the literature specified under "Part II" above, assigned readings and material, and the contents of lectures 11-28 and workshops 4-7, will be worth 24 points. You need to get at least 12 points in order to pass. The examination for this part can be taken at any of the three exam opportunities after the lecture period, when you can take either or both of the parts.

There will be a total of 7 computer workshops – one every two weeks after the first two, which have only one week in between – during the course. The first workshop, although you are required to submit a deliverable, will for obvious reasons not yield any points. Workshops 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 will be worth a maximum of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 points, respectively. In order to pass, you have to submit all 7 workshop deliverables, and collect a total of at least 22 points out of 45 possible from them. The workshops may (preferably!) be completed and submitted in groups of two people - excepting, for obvious reasons, the first one - as long as you never submit more than one workshop with the same partner.

Change (November 24th): We will make do with six workshops. The seventh one will not take place. The total points you get from the workshops 2-6 - a maximum of 35 - will be multiplied by a factor of 45/35 = 9/7 in order to still grade the workshops on a scale of 0 to 45 points total.

The company case project is also required, and will be worth 11 points. You need 6 points in order to pass. The project will be done, presented, and submitted, in groups of 4-6 people.

In order to pass the course, you consequently need to:

• pass the exam for part I with at least 10 points out of 20,

• pass the exam for part II with at least 12 points out of 24,

• submit all computer workshop deliverables, and collect at least 22 points out of 45, and

• present and submit the company case project and collect at least 6 points out of 11.

Your grade, on a scale of 1 (satisfactory) to 5 (excellent), will be based on your total points (between 50 and 100) on the standard linear scale.

Results

Workshops

Company Case

Exams

Ethics

We - the school, the faculty, and your fellow students - expect and require that you make a good-faith effort to do the required work in this course without cheating. Briefly: It is not considered okay to copy-paste from anywhere into work that you submit as your own, except under the very strict code governing the use of scientific citations and quotations. It is certainly not okay to use other people's code as such in the workshop submissions, with or without asking their permission. But on the other hand it is quite okay to discuss, compare, collaborate in testing and debugging - the computer workshops are not a competitive sport! We will discuss this issue in the first lectures, and there will be more detailed guidelines and instructions in the workshop assignments. If, despite this, you feel that something is unclear regarding what goes and what doesn't, please ask the faculty directly.

Staying in touch

Please refer to the web pages for current contact information for the faculty. Oana Velcu handles the computer workshops and most things of an administrative nature. Anders Tallberg does the lectures and is responsible for the course as the official examiner.

The web pages of the students attending the course are, of course, on the PAFIS web server. There is also an email list, afis03@pafis.shh.fi , which forwards mail to all the students attending this particular course, and of course to the faculty. Please feel free to use this one to communicate with fellow students regarding matters specific to this course. However, please also think twice before using it. Make sure that what you are mailing is both related to this course, and relevant to all participants. Questions regarding the exams, lectures, exercises and so on are perfectly all right; so are, for instance, tip-offs about useful and relevant web pages you've found. It should be obvious that off-topic stuff like advertisments, forwarded jokes, politics, or anything resembling spam is not okay at all. Abuse will be dealt with in a brutal and efficient manner.

Because this email list is also used to communicate possible changes in the schedule and other possibly urgent or important (or both) stuff, and because it works by sending mail to your @pafis.shh.fi email address, please make sure that you either read your mail on the pafis.shh.fi server regularly, or have it set up to forward your mail to a mailbox that you do read regularly.

If you have something to communicate which you would prefer to say anonymously - criticism, feedback, suggestions, whatever - then the easiest way to do so is to use one of the feedback forms that will be available at every lecture. Do please make a habit of letting us know how things are coming across! Unless we get that information we cannot really even begin to think about improving or fixing things.

All changes, instructions, updates, announcements and so on will of course be posted on the course pages on the PAFIS web site. Please note that this particular page - the main course page on the web - and in particular the schedule section is where you will find the links to lectures, readings, workshop assignments, exam results and everything related to this course. And please do not assume that a web page, once you've read it, is by this action on your part carved into stone and frozen forever. This page, for instance, will live and change throughout the course, and so will most of the other ones.

Good luck with the course!