The Effect of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) on the Control Activities, Case Study: Steel Company

In the recent years, using organizational integrated systems has been foremost in organizational projects all over the world. In this respect the most significant available mean is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Competitive business environments, necessity of inter and intra organizational integration and unity, and poor internal control are the key reasons of developing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This paper aims to study the relation between ERP and one of the components of internal control (under the COSO), control activities, and to help the auditors to reduce time and costs of auditing related to the test of controls. It finally results in increasing the reliability of financial reporting and reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of an organization’s objectives. The higher the reliability and assurance, the easier it will be for the management to make decisions and plan to reach short-term and long-term goals of the organization.This research mostly tries to focus on the financial parts of an organization and contains two main hypotheses. The first hypothesis tries to see the effectiveness of ERP implementation in an organization, and the second one measures these effects on 4 different financial segments, including management accounting, cost accounting, public accounting and financial accounting.This study has been conducted as a case study and by distribution of the questionnaire in four areas of Esfahan Steel Company. In this paper we have used the T-test and ANOVA to analyze the data. According to the conducted tests, it seems clear that the ERP have influenced on control activities in all those 4 parts. However, the impacts are different in each segment.