ANALYSIS OF EXISTING ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) PRACTICES AND DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAMEWORK FOR ITS EFFECTIVENESS

Abstract

In this era of agility organizations are striving hard to provide their customers best services/products, in order to increase their business. Communication within and outside organizations is one of the ways to achieve this goal. Enterprise Resource Planning known as ERP is one of the major information system used by organizations to improve their internal as well as external integration with customers or vendors. On the other hand installing ERP is one major and crucial part of it. The success of ERP implementation to obtain desired benefits is dependent on its critical success factors commonly known as CSFs. These factors cannot be neglected before implementing ERP in an organization; otherwise this information system can proved to be a financial disaster as ERP is a very expensive investment for any organization. This research is carried out to study these factors and to get an insight of how ERP benefits can be obtained by implementing these critical success factors. This research shows that all these factors, which are divided into five different areas, are correlated to each other. Implementation of one factor from one area affects the other critical success factors from the same or different area. Therefore in order to get potential benefits from ERP according to the requirements of the organizations these critical success factors (CSFs) must be studied, evaluated and implemented carefully.