The purpose of this article is to provide further insights into the adoption of enterprise resource planning systems (ERPS) and the impacts on organisational performance. It aims at challenging existing claims of ERP vendors with regards to the benefits of their products and at providing evidence of the benefits of bundling ERPS with supply chain management systems (SCMS). A survey was conducted to collect data on several aspects of organisational performance in companies which adopted ERPS, SCMS and the respective control groups. Financial key performance indicators were used to measure overall firm performance and the Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model to operationalise performance at the business process (supply chain) level. Our key results contradict the claims of ERPS vendors insofar as we found no significant performance differences between ERPS adopters and non-adopters, neither at the core business process level, nor at the overall firm level. While we could confirm that, the longer the experience of firms with ERPS, the higher their overall performance, we found no evidence of a similar effect on business process (supply chain) performance. Only those ERPS adopters which also adopted SCMS achieved significantly higher performance at the business process level.

0 ver the past decade, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system offerings from S N , Oracle, Peoplesoft, Baan, JD Edwards and others have become the dominant business information system software platform for large companies and government bodies in Anglo-American countries (Davenport, 1998).' In Australia, for example, a 1998 survey by the GartnerGroup, CFO magazine and the ASCPA found an average ERP usage rate of 52.7%, ranging from a high of 71.4% in manufacturing to a low of 29.6% in "other services" (Philipson 1999)? This trend reflects an earlier wave of adoption of ERP software in Europe and North America. This rise to dominance of ERP systems represents a fundamental shift in the nature of business information systems. Compared with the often in-housedeveloped legacy systems they have supplanted, EFP systems offer significantly increased sophistication, enabling integration of the software and underlying relational databases across all functional areas (accounting, human resources, operations and logistics, sales and marketing). This potentially allows the organisation to have a "seamless integration" of all the information flowing through it, and presents "managers who have struggled, at great expense and with great frustration, with incompatible information systems and inconsistent operating practices, the promise of an off-the-shelf solution to the problem of business integration" (Davenport 1998, p. 121).However, as Davenport and other commentators have noted, gaining such benefits is not without difficulties. ERP systems are complex software systems presenting major technical challenges and usually requiring large investments of time and money. More important, they confront the organisation with a significant management problem. To achieve their high level of integration, ERP systems have their own internal logic of "best practice" business processes. When implementing an ERP system, the organisation needs to reconcile the technical imperatives of the system with strategic and management needs. Unlike highly customised legacy systems, ERP systems require the This paper reports on the enteqbrise resource planning (ERP) systems experiences of Australian companies. I t examines the degree of information system integration and associated benefits that respondent companies believe they have achieved, and the impact of ERP systems on the adoption of new accounting practices.The results indicate that while ERP users report high levels of information integration for many functional areas, the pattern is similar to that of nonusers. Also, ERP systems seem to perform better in transaction processing and ad hoc decisionsupport than in sophisticated decision-support and reporting. Finally, ERP systems were found to have little influence on the use of new accounting practices.

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Business Intelligence (BI) systems have been a top priority of CIOs for a decade, but little is known about how to successfully manage those systems beyond the implementation phase. This paper investigates the direct and indirect effects of BI management quality on the quality of managerial decision making using PLS analysis of survey responses of senior IT managers in Australia. The results confirm this overall relationship (total effect), but also reveal mediating effects of data/information quality and BI solution scope. The study contributes to both academia and industry by providing first time evidence of direct and indirect determinants of managerial decision support improvements related to BI solutions scope and active management of BI.

The present study provides empirical evidence on the economic benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. We use a modified value chain approach and identify several ratios for each component of the value chain to reflect improvements as a result of the adoption of ERP systems. These financial ratios are tracked for 2 years for a group of companies that adopted ERP systems versus a group of companies that did not adopt ERP. Both univariate and multivariate statistics are used to test for differences. The key result of the present study is that the adoption of ERP systems leads to sustained operational efficiencies and improved overall liquidity. In addition, some support is found for increased profitability 2 years after the adoption of ERP and for improvements in accounts receivable management.