The perceived success of ERP systems for decision support

The management and implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has tended to concentrate on their transactional and record-keeping aspects, rather than on their decision-support capabilities. As ERP systems have evolved, they have become increasingly important as a way of leveraging transaction data for building decision support and analytics applications. This paper explores connections between ERP systems and decision support based on the perceptions of 53 ERP system adopters. The notion of the “perceived success” of enterprise systems for the decision support function is broken down further into four dimensions: decision support for individuals, for decision participants working jointly, for inter-related decisions, and for decisions involving multiple organizations. This study offers new insights into the important relationship between the perceived success of the ERP system and its role as a foundation for more advanced decision support applications.