In the brick of digitalization industry revolution era, this study signifies the pertinent role of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) towards assisting the organization towards attaining the firm's mission and goal. This study extends the knowledge by exploring the relationship between ERPs and management control (MC), which in turn enhances firm's competitive advantage. Realizing the limited empirical work on ERPs from management accounting and control perspective, the discussion would be drawn from business stakeholder's perspective, instead of from information technology standpoint. The study views ERPs as an important resource in creating the capability to control the business operations and combination of both factors creates the firm's competitive advantage. Survey questionnaires were administered via email to 972 randomly selected manufacturing firms listed in Federation of Malaysian Manufacturer Directory. Based on the 114 usable responses, the data was analyzed using a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach through partial least square (PLS) software. The findings provide empirical evidence on the significance of ERPs in determining firm's MC approaches, both technocratic and socio-ideological forms of control. Evidently, these variables do associate positively with competitive advantage. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates that only technocratic form of MC mediates the relationship between ERPs and competitive advantage, but not for socio-ideological control. These findings provide an insight on the relationship among ERPs, form of MC and firm's competitive advantage, which may be an input for businesses in facing the industrial digitalization era.
During the industry 4.0 revolutions and business intelligence era, in which automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies becomes a prerequisite. Therefore, companies aspiring for achieving competitive advantage need to be updated with the latest technologies. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are among the most up-to-date integrated information systems which play particularly important role in overseeing and coordinating all the activities, information and functions and information of a business from common database. Despite the fact that previous studies indicate a lack of understanding of the relationship between ERP systems and competitive advantage using each of ERP business processes attributes (i.e. integration, standardization, routinaziation and centralization) need to be investigated. Based on the 114 functional answers, the data was examined utilizing the following approach: structural equation modeling (SEM) via the software: partial least square (PLS). The results offer empirical evidence on the importance of every ERP attribute in determining firm's competitive. Evidently, there is a positive association between such variables and the competitive benefit. Such findings present an insight on the association between ERP attributes and the competitive advantage of an enterprise, which could be an input for businesses so as to encounter the industrial digitalization and the era of business intelligence.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.