Global markets and competition have forced companies to operate in a physically distributed environment to take the advantage of benefits of strategic alliances between partnering firms. Earlier, information systems such as Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) have widely been used for functional integration within an organization. With global operations in place, there is a need for suitable Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and E-Commerce (EC) for the integration of extended enterprises along the supply chain with the objective of achieving flexibility and responsiveness. Companies all over the world spend billions of dollars in the design and implementation of EIS in particular ERP systems such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, JD Edwards and BAAN with the objective of achieving an integrated global supply chain. Inter-organizational information systems play a major role in improving communication and integration between partnering firms to achieve an integrated global supply chain. There is a growing demand for research and applications that will provide insights into issues, challenges, and solutions related to the successful applications and management aspects of EIS.
This journal is a timely source of high quality articles on the latest developments in enterprise resource planning and electronic commerce. It is a must for any researcher or organization that aims for an integrated supply chain development using enterprise resource planning and electronic commerce systems.
IJEIS is a peer-reviewed journal with truly a global approach to deal with the most important subject of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and electronic commerce (EC). It is an indispensable source of information on ERP and EC.
The aggregation of research within this one journal in an international outlet provides a critical mass understanding on this topic that may have existed only in 'special issues' of other publication outlets. The focus and depth of the topics offered on enterprise information systems provides the potential for ground-breaking work to merge in this area. It is refreshing to see such a journal emerging as a timely and needed outlet on such an important topic to engineering, management, and organizational researchers and practitioners.
I am pleased to see a journal for enterprise information systems and electronic commerce which I believe is important both for the management information systems and operations management community.