Multi-enterprise collaborative enterprise resource planning and decision support systems

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and decision support systems (DSS) have independently evolved and prospered in the marketplace as well as in academia. More recently, ERP and related systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) are incorporating decision support tools and technologies. These include business intelligence, customer intelligence, supply chain intelligence, and business analytics. At the same time, DSS are taking advantage of the data resident in ERP systems. This emerging convergence has motivated us to look at the integration of ERP and DSS. The integration of ERP and DSS provides firms with a number of advantages. First, they are able to maximise their Intelligence Density. Second, they are able to improve the quality and visibility of their information. Finally, they can form a solid foundation from which they can achieve multi-enterprise collaboration. Over the years, researchers and practitioners have proposed frameworks and architectures for ERP and DSS exclusively. However, there is little in the way of academic literature, frameworks, architectures, and implementations that integrate ERP and DSS in a coherent fashion. We address this area of research by first conducting a review of the independent and combined literature in the fields of ERP and DSS. This literature review paves the way for the proposal of a multi-enterprise collaborative conceptual ERP-DSS framework that considers SCM, enterprise management, and CRM as components. This framework brings together the ERP and DSS integrated solutions offered by a host of well-known vendors in the marketplace. We then combine our own insight with respect to multiple-enterprise collaboration via the integration of ERP and DSS to propose a set of high-level and medium-level system frameworks. These system frameworks depict the mechanisms behind the integration of ERP and DSS both within the firm, and in a multi-enterprise collaborative context.