DO THE ERP SYSTEMS MAKE ENTERPRISES MORE COMPETITIVE?

Abstract

Enterprises are investing time, energy and money, which reaches dozens of millions of dollars, in the implementation of integrated management systems seeking to increase their competitivity. But, does an ERP system provide an effective increase in competitivity? To answer this question which troubles the enterprises all over the world, a field research was performed at industrial enterprises of medium size, founded on the methodology based on concepts of fields and means of competition. Besides presenting the main characteristics of the ERP systems and the main concepts of fields and means of competition, the article reports the results of the research, which had a double objective: to try to understand how competitivity of the industrial enterprises can be potentialized by means of the ERP systems implementation and the evaluation of the ERP effects in the competitivity of the enterprises. Therefore, the fields of competition elected by the enterprises were identified and the degree of the competitivity of the enterprises, the power of the potentiation of the ERP, the degree of the means of competition use and the influence of the size and the amount of the net revenue in the competitivity. The rigorous statistic treatment of the data, collected by means of a questionary answered by 23 enterprises, led to a lot of conclusions. Maybe the most important has been the verification that there is a meaningful difference among the degree of the competitivity of the enterprises which have an ERP system and the competitivity of the ones which do not have this system.