Along with the rise of globalization, enterprises nowadays have to struggle to survive and compete in a tough business competition. Each enterprise - no matter which type of market industry that they are doing their business in - need to adjust their business operations to win this tough competition. Thus, every single enterprise needs to make proper plan to support its business operation in achieving its main goals. In fact, in this modern world of technology, IT or Information Technology has been considered as an ideal source to differentiate an enterprise from other competitors in the market. The propensity of enterprises nowadays is to generate more profit at the lowest cost. In addition to this, the enterprise also has realized that they need to be reactive and to the consistently changing requirements and needs of both internal and also external customers.  This is where the Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system presents its functions. This system is typically tailored by the enterprise with a purpose to maintain their organizational resources. This paper will detail how ERP system works, a framework for EPR implementation in organization, along with the evaluation of open source ERP.

Enterprise Resource Planning

             Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system is commonly adopted by the organizations in order to maintain organizational resources. Management of the enterprise resources enables the managerial staff members to ensure efficient use of assets and resources in the organization for the execution of business operations in a more profitable way. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) enables an organization to develop integrated products that manage and control most of the operations executed in the organization. In general, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) works for the single but unified types of operations rather than concerning the groups of separate business operations. Basically, it relates to the integration system of business operations of an organization. Different business entities improve integration between activities and processes done at the workplace.

           However, to fulfill the requirement of streamline workflows the most important system is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Organizations working in the competitive environment focuses on the visibility of future to make accurate decisions about services and production process of the company (Srivardhana & Pawlowski, 2007). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software provide provision of reliable information about time and cost. While at the same time, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software brings visibility in the organization to make managerial staff capable of taking right decisions based on demand forecasting about resources. Scare organizational resources can draw negative impact on the organizational outcomes if not managed properly. For instance, the efficiency of time resource utilization is to develop an appropriate timeline to done different activities within allocated time limits. Enterprise resources planning (ERP) a full package comes with all important features that are desired by the company to execute business operations within time and prevent an organization from extra cost which is directly related to the profitability of the business operations (LEE & LEE, 2000).

            Some common examples of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software are Sage, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. According to the research studies, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software are usually implemented and installed in the large-sized local and international companies. However, small-sized companies develop manual systems for resource planning and tracking use of resources in the production, manufacturing. And strategy. The key limitation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for small and medium-sized companies is cost factor (Nagy, Yassin, & Bhattacherjee, 2010). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is highly expensive. Additionally, cost of maintenance and installation require huge budgets. Thus considering this open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the best alternative for many organizations. Open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is cost-effective and reasonable for all size companies. Open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) comes with several other advantages also. For instance, it provides a limited restriction to access data and monitor demos. Companies working in the manufacturing and service sector can access Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to ensure flexibility and customization of the ERP implementation. The following image represents the system module of open source enterprise resources planning system. According to this module there are six major areas which are materials management, quality management, controlling the project phase by project management, human resources, sales and distribution, customer activities related to sales and distribution, and financial and accounting.(Wang, Lin, Jiang, & Klein, 2007)

References of Enterprise Resource Planning

LEE, Z., & LEE, J. (2000). An ERP implementation case study from a knowledge transfer perspective. Journal of Information Technology, 15, 281-288.

Nagy, D., Yassin, A. M., & Bhattacherjee, A. (2010). Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software: Barriers and Remedies. Communications of the ACM, 53(3), 148-151.

Srivardhana, T., & Pawlowski, S. D. (2007). ERP systems as an enabler of sustained business process innovation: A knowledge-based view. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 16(1), 51-69.

Wang, E. T., Lin, C. C.-L., Jiang, J. J., & Klein, G. (2007). Improving enterprise resource planning (ERP) fit to organizational process through knowledge transfer. International Journal of Information Management, 27(1), 200-212.