Introduction
In 1980s, as everything went global and economic activities became more complicated, past management accounting programmes such as Material requirements planning (MRP) and Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II), being unable to keep pace with times, were no longer to be relevant because they were not quite useful for decision-making and control purposes in such a competitive environment. Without replacing these elements, Enterprise resource planning (ERP) came to represent “a larger scope that reflected the evolution of application integration beyond manufacturing” (Sheilds and Mureell, 2005). According to Anurag (2009), MRP evolved into ERP as managers noticed that ‘routings’ and capacity planning activity had become essential parts of the software architecture. ERP was firstly introduced by Gartner Group Inc in 1990s, generally defined as a process by which a company manages and integrates different parts or areas of its business, for instance, purchasing, inventory, sales, marketing, finance, human resources and so on.
In this essay, we will firstly, illustrate the origin and development of ERP and then, investigate how and why it emerged and diffused in 1990s. After that, intended and unintended effects of ERP will be evaluated. Finally, the conclusion will be drawn and recommendation of future research will be given. The main objective of this essay is to learn ERP in all aspects and put efforts to evaluate it.
In order to lower total costs in the entire supply chain, save throughput time, reduce inventory, provide better delivery and also satisfy customers, ERP became more inclusive to solve practical problems. By the mid-1990s, ERP was enriched to be more substantiated, including accounting, maintenance, human-resource components and so on. Meanwhile, it could not only address enterprise function problems, but also increase efficiency of