Contribution of ERP to the decision-making process through knowledge management

Abstract

AbstractThis research explores how knowledge management influences the contribution of enterprise resource planning (ERP) to the decision-making process. An immersion experience including a two-month observation and 24 in-depth interviews was conducted in two North African small and medium-sized industries (SMIs) which used the same ERP. The knowledge creation spiral of Nonaka and Konno (Citation1998) has been applied to both of them. Accordingly, one of the SMIs had some good practices of knowledge management while the other lacked any. Results show that the good practices of knowledge management favour a suitable use of ERP, and consequently lead to an undeniable improvement of the decision-making process. However, practices carried out haphazardly cause fruitless use of ERP, therefore hampering any contribution to the decision-making process. The paper suggests a parallelism between ERP, the decision-making process and knowledge management.Keywords: SECIERP systemsdecision-making processknowledge managementcase study Notes1. MFG/PRO is produced by the American editor QAD Inc. It is a production and distribution management software particularly convenient to processes' management. It includes functions of command following, finance management and after-sell service supervision. It is composed of seven sections: distribution, supply, system files, manufacturing, personalisation, finance and support service. Each one includes different modules which cover manufacturing activities from managing repetitive tasks to big series or personalised production.