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The world of businesses changing gets an ever-accelerating rate. Companies today face the challenge of increasing competition, expanding markets, and rising customer expectations. This increases the pressure on companies to lower total costs in the entire supply chain, shorten throughput times, drastically reduce inventories, expand product choice, provide more reliable delivery dates and better customer service, improve quality, and efficiently coordinate global demand, supply, and production. In the face of these challenges, the role of technology is also changing rapidly. In such a complex environment, organizations need multi- dimensional solution suites that can help them protect their sustainable competitive advantages. Hence, the need to integrate key functions of the firms in order to improve productivity encourages companies to the implementation of integrated enterprise information systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (Al-Mashari, 2003; Ehie, 2005; Nikookar, 2010; Pham & Teich, 2011; Sohrabi & Jafarzadeh, 2010; Umble et al., 2003; Yeh et al., 2007).
ERP system as an enterprise-wide information system is a combination of business processes and information technology, constituting an integrated enterprise computing system. It is designed to automate core corporate activities and flow of material, information, and financial resources among all functions within an enterprise on a common database. It provides a real opportunity for organizations to reduce business costs and integrate all necessary business processes and functions such as product planning, purchasing, inventory control, sales, financial and human resources, into a single system with a shared database (Chang et al., 2008; Ifinedo, 2008; Kutlu &Akpinar, 2009; Karsak & O¨ zogul, 2009; Liao et al., 2007; Morton & Hu, 2008; Sawah et al., 2008; Wu, 2011; Zahedi et al., 2011). It consists of a number of software modules aimed at supporting all business processes across functional divisions of an organization and enables organizations to manage their resources efficiently and effectively (e.g. materials, human resources, finance and the like) and meet an organization’s information processing needs (Pan et al., 2011; Ramayah & Lo, 2007). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is designed to integrate and optimize various business processes such as order entry and production planning across the entire firm (Motwani et al., 2005). It is an obvious fit with efforts to improve operational effectiveness that can achieve integration and streamlining of internal processes by providing a suite of software modules that cover all the functional areas of a business (Beard, 2004; Upadhyay et al., 2011). In fact, ERP system is a smart tool that can be used by a firm to solve problems associated with widely distributed information sources (Chang, 2008).