ERP and SCM Integration: The Impact on Measuring Business Performance

Organizations rely on various types of information systems (IS) to manage day-to-day business and make decisions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems. Organizations rely on ERP systems to replace their legacy systems, integrate core business processes and to help adding value and increasing visibility. Additionally, SCM systems help organizations to enhance relationships with supply chain members. It is essential for organizations to measure their business performance by taking into consideration intra-organizational and inter-organizational indicators. Therefore, the integration between ERP and SCM systems is a key to enable more business performance; that were otherwise hidden. Accordingly, the motive for this paper is to study the influence of ERP-SCM integration on enabling more business performance measures. For this reason, a business performance measures framework was constructed and then tested on two organizations using multi-case study qualitative research approach. Analysis results indicated that integrating ERP and SCM systems would render more performance measures and hence enable better and wider-scope evaluation. Consequently, managers are more informed and accordingly are able to make high quality decisions.