Ghana Small and Medium Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise Resource Planning in African Perspective: A Study on Ghana

Introduction

Many investigators and practitioners have arguably assessed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) schemes as the most well liked enterprise programs of the last fifteen years (Wagner et al., 2006; Ehie and Madsen, 2005; Beheshti, 2006). These schemes got very well renowned partially because of their pledges to moving best practices embedded with the technology's conceive, incorporating organizational enterprise methods, and distributing data over purposeful localities through a widespread database. All these pledges have provoked commentators to affirm that they are a prerequisite for achievement in the 21st 100 years (Davenport, 2000).

An ERP scheme is classically characterised as a bundled enterprise programs scheme that endows a business to organise the effective and productive use of assets (materials, human assets, investment, etc.) by supplying a total incorporated answer for the organization's information-processing desires, through a process-oriented outlook normalized over the enterprise (Nah et al., 2001).

Historically, these schemes have heir origins back in the 60?s when associations (especially large-scale constructing companies) begun to use the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) form to automate their provide string of connections activities. MRP packages were shortly expanded to MRP II, which encompassed other purposes for example capability designing and expert output arranging founded on sales forecasting. This evolution finally directed to the ERP notion, which incorporates the transaction processing undertakings of all purposeful localities in the whole enterprise. The notion have then been expanded to ERP II, which put more focus on the mastering of provide string of connections administration, thereby incorporating external parties into the system. Recent expansion in ERP packages could accommodate more notions for example clientele connection administration, task command, value administration, workflow administration, and even information administration (Sandoe et al., 2001; Beheshti, 2006; Elbertsen et al., 2006).

Today, there are more than 100 ERP schemes vendors in the market but only five of them share 60 per hundred of the ERP market: SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, People Soft, and BAAN. Each of these major players has its own salient characteristic (Botta-Genoulaz and Millet, 2006). According to AMR Research, the market for ERP schemes is anticipated to augment from US$ 13.4 billion in 2003 to a projected US$ 15.8 billion in 2008 (Richardson, 2004). This market is generally trained as the biggest, matching to the other segments of applications' schemes associations normally use (Scott and Shepherd, 2002).

According to a study preformed by the Meta Group, utilising a experiment of 63 businesses, the mean total cost of a entire ERP scheme discovered to be roughly $9 millions. However, this number appears somewhat reduced in evaluation to numerous ERP schemes needed more than one century millions for their tasks (Beheshti, 2006). In spite of their high charges, ERP projects' goals are not effortlessly achieved. Very couple of businesses described that their plans had accomplished important value. Although numerous businesses asserted achievement, couple of contacted their objectives or recognized important economic influence, while some other ones could have accomplished alike worth for less cash (Buckhout ...