Applying Enterprise Resource Planning at the Palestinian Large-Scale Private Organizations

Abstract

As technology expands, so must business. Organizations realize the need for computer systems that will help them achieve their strategic and competitive goals. They are implementing the information technology to gain financial performance and to support their business strategies (Andreas, 2004). In recent years, applying ERP has played an important role in business integration. This system ensures efficient and effective information. Enterprise resource planning is a software that attempts to integrate all developments and functions across a company on to a single computer system that can serve all those different departments needs. Therefore, this study attempts to find out whether the Palestinian large-scale private organizations are aware of the ERP system, its advantages and how the ERP system can improve their business performance. Furthermore, it tries to identify the barriers that prevent local private companies from moving forward towards ERP implementation. In addition, it discusses the reasons of failure of the ERP system within companies that attempted to implement the ERP system . The study is descriptive and exploratory as it seeks to measure the degree of awareness to ERP systems, its benefits and its drawbacks. The two main instruments that were used to collect and analyze data, and as a result form the conclusions and recommendations, were the questionnaire survey and the interviews. The interviews were carried out personally or by telephone to clarify some points of the questionnaire. The data collected was analyzed by the SPSS program (version 12). Frequency tables, pie and bar charts were 11 mainly used to answer the research questions in chapter one. Finally conclusions and recommendations were formed. The findings of this study indicate that the Palestinian large-scale private organizations are not aware of technological developments, especially the ERP system, its benefits and how they can improve their performance. However, the majority wishes to implement such systems. This suggests that there is a pressing need for performing a number of workshops that are carried out by universities in cooperation with solution providers for the top management of the Palestinian enterprises to increase their information about the latest innovations and their importance