Impact of Enterprise Resource Planning in Supply Chain Management

To survive and stay ahead in today’s competitive world companies are pushed to their limits in search for organizational skills and technologies. Of those Supply chain Management and Enterprise Resource Planning are the two most primarily used terms. In order to stay and survive in the competition companies are forced to speed up their production, reduce their cost and improve performance. All these three factors go hand in hand and in order to achieve these factors, information exchange from both inside and outside plays the key role. Supply chain management is the term used managing this accurate information’s in and out and ERP is the technology used for achieving the same.The purpose of this research is to continue in this field of study and solve real problems with ERP implementation, and eventually create analytical tools for these systems. With the advent of globalization ERP software has emerged as a major area of interest for many business organizations.There are two main research orientations in these studies which include: first, how to implement ERP system in a corporation and, second, what are the advantages of this system in resolving a variety of problems an organization might encounter.The first area, on which most of the studies have already focused, comprises studies on the fund, timing, economy and success of the implementation of ERP. On the contrary, our study addresses the functions of ERP in strategic and operational levels and also aims at bringing in the major difficulties and disadvantage on implementation of ERP systems into an organization.Our results suggest that ERP systems in its current state have a modest role to play in obtaining supply chain integration and management. With the major development in the field of communication and IT solutions we can expect a time shift where many solutions could be available for better interfacing of ERP systems and in turn which can help in achieving much better supply chain management.Many studies claim that the major advantage of an ERP system is that it is integrated and centralized. An ERP system offers the decision makers the means of enhancing the knowledge about the process which in turn helps to make reliable decisions more rapidly and as well collecting sources to support their decisions. However according to our findings from various studies it is evident that ERP helps to improve the reliability of decision by mutual participation of the participants, improves co-ordination of tasks which makes inter-related decision making easier. As a result it improves the satisfaction of decision process across the participants.Program: Master’s Program in Industrial Engineering with Specialization in Logistics Managemen