Using ERP Systems to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Businesses today confront new markets, new competition, and increasing customer expectations. Thus, companies are constantly having to update their business practices and procedures to be even more responsive to their customers and competition. Within the last decade, information technology emerged as an essential tool to give businesses a competitive advantage. More specifically, ERP (Enterprise resource planning) systems are a major information technology being used, in hopes of obtaining this competitive advantage. The efficiency of an enterprise relies upon how quickly information flows across the complete supply chain i.e. from the manufacturer to the supplier to the consumer and so forth. The main purpose of an ERP system is to expedite the supply chain and to make it more efficient.
ERP is an enterprise wide system that integrates primary business applications, including all areas and levels of an organization. Each application within an ERP suite shares a common set of data that is stored in a central database. …