An Evaluation of the Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning in Organizations - Article Example

The paper "An Evaluation of the Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning in Organizations" is a good example of a finance and accounting article. Basically, the definition of Enterprise Resource Planning or better known as ERP is not easy as every researcher would have their own definition of the system. Additionally, as noted by Klaus et al (2000), the scope of ERP is extremely wide in literature and contains many aspects. For the purpose of this paper, I have chosen the definition of ERP by Kale (2000, p. 13) where he defined ERP in a broad manner:

“An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software application package is a suite of pre-engineered, ready-to-implement, integrated application modules, catering to all the business functions of an enterprise and possessing the flexibility for configuring and customizing dynamically the delivered functionality of the package to suit the specific requirements of the enterprise. ERP enables an enterprise to operate as an integrated, enterprisewide, process-oriented, information-driven, and real-time enterprise”

With this, we can take note that the implementation of ERP within an organization is not something taken lightly as large and significant investment is put in, sometimes exceeding $1 billion in some companies (Davenport, 2000). Additionally, ERP is important as when it is implemented, it binds the organization’s resources that are needed to perform daily transactions. To justify the amount of money spent on ERP implementation, it has generated more than $20 billion in annual revenues for suppliers and $20 billion for firms that offer consultation (Willcocks and Sykes, 2000).

How ERP is implemented within an organization is dependent on what the company wants, what resources are available, the speed at which it is implemented and how well the implementation runs. Relatively speaking, an implementation of ERP which can be considered fast would be approximately six months but it can take up to more than five years (Davenport, 2000, p. 14).