Integration of enterprise applications and functional fit: The role of ERP in supporting management objectives

Companies have been investing in integrated enterprise applications for over a decade, without firm evidence of a return on investment. Much research has centered on the factors that lead to successful implementation projects (eg: Holland and Light, 1999; Shanks and Seddon, 2000), but to date there appears to be little research on the longer term impact of ERP systems on the organisation (Heili and Vinck, 2008). Although ERP applications have meant that there is more operational information available to managers, the data stored in ERP applications requires much off-line manipulation in order to be meaningful to managers. In addition, the gradual evolution of physical processes over time inevitably leads to a gap between the ERP system, and the reality it is designed to capture (Lee and Lee, 2000). Taking the evaluation of management performance against objectives as research domain, and focusing on a case study in the pharmaceutical sector, this paper looks at the footprint of a global ERP system in the day to day decision making of managers in KPC Ltd. Although the ERP implementation resulted in major improvements in data integrity at an operational level, resulting in improved visibility of costs and traceability of transactions for head office, many of the benefits associated with exploiting this information have been compromised by the need to rely on non-integrated tools for certain specific functions. Thus, for decision making purposes, managers must still download data to spreadsheets, where they are manipulated and combined with data from other, non-integrated systems. This paper shows the gap between management actions and the informational and decisional support provided by the ERP.