ERP Systems Development: Enhancing Organization´s Strategic Control through Monitoring Agents

Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are powerful software packages that enable the integration of a variety of business activities. There are many success stories of ERP systems use and implementation, but there are also significant evidence of failures. So far, there is not enough research that investigates the technical factors that determine the success of use of an ERP system. This paper investigates the case study of a bus company that needs to enhance its ERP system to support the alignment between business processes and strategy. The specific problem of the company was the low level of managerial control over the bus maintenance process, resulting in a poor performance of the process and a consequent low quality of the final service to the customer. The solution to the problem we proposed was the integration of monitoring agents called probes into the ERP system that are able to link the process performances to the strategic goals, objectives or constraints. The introduction of the probes enhances the organization´s strategic control by offering a continuous monitoring of the strategic goals achievement, hence increasing the understanding of the company behavior. That has determined the adoption of strategic changes that managed to obtain higher performances of the maintenance process and consequentially an higher quality of the offered service.