Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: a research agenda

TLDR

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are viewed as a major IT innovation that integrates business processes and increasingly supports advanced electronic and mobile commerce, yet research on the technology remains limited. The authors propose a novel taxonomy to structure ERP research and outline future work to survey additional major areas within this framework. The paper reviews current ERP research themes—including adoption, technical aspects, and IS curricula—and offers a discussion intended to benefit researchers and practitioners.

Abstract

The continuing development of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has been considered by many researchers and practitioners as one of the major IT innovations in this decade. ERP solutions seek to integrate and streamline business processes and their associated information and work flows. What makes this technology more appealing to organizations is increasing capability to integrate with the most advanced electronic and mobile commerce technologies. However, as is the case with any new IT field, research in the ERP area is still lacking and the gap in the ERP literature is huge. Attempts to fill this gap by proposing a novel taxonomy for ERP research. Also presents the current status with some major themes of ERP research relating to ERP adoption, technical aspects of ERP and ERP in IS curricula. The discussion presented on these issues should be of value to researchers and practitioners. Future research work will continue to survey other major areas presented in the taxonomy framework.