Week 3; Discussion Question The computing age and the supercomputing age have also had an impact on business

and finance. Accounting information which had over the years been recorded in massive books and ledgers over years and years, giving rise to many a dust filled room with rows of shelves bursting with thick leather bound journals, ledgers and sub-ledgers could now be stored on a single Excel workbook, with a single worksheet for every year, or journal as required. Quite simple? Was this nirvana of storage and management of financial information? Not quite. The evolving business environment requires that financial information is required in a timely, accurate and relevant manner to provide information and also serve as a base for decision making. Since every activity that any organization performs irrespective of nature and structure can be recorded as some sort of financial transaction, it is important that whatever system is used to record this information can integrate with the rest of the organisations operations such that the data is captured timely and a complete data set is available for analysis. Exit the humble spreadsheet, enter the ERP. An ERP system is a set of business applications or modules, which links various business units of an organization such as financial, accounting, manufacturing, and human resources into a tightly integrated single system with a common platform for flow of information across the entire organization (Galani et al., 2010). Their selling point is mainly that they provide a common system language for different units of the organization to talk to each other every day and as required, translate all this speech into financial information that can be understood and used to drive decision making. For most organisations, the adoption of ERP systems such as SAP was an expensive and time consuming process. My company has spent 10 years and more than 50 million CHF in a drive to implement SAP systems in every single company of the Group in the world and the process is still not complete. So, for the companies that made the change, what was the impact? In a study of the impact of the adoption of ERPs in Greek companies, Scapens and Jazayeri ( 2003), found that that there were no major changes in the nature of information provided by management accountants, but the changes occurred more in the roles that they played. The implementation helped to reduce or eliminate routine tasks and gave the people the opportunity to develop a major strategic and forward looking nature to their roles. In a similar study, Spathis and Constantinides (2004), also found out that after the implementation of ERPs, most companies were able to focus more on analyzing information and less on the generation of reports. So clearly benefits to the organization exist. What about the consumer? The main purpose of a business enterprise is to delight and satisfy the consumer and so has the adoption of ERPs enhanced the organization to do this? The answer is varied, but the truth is that; yes it should. ERPs provide an opportunity for the standardization and streamlining of processes in the organization. It sets a framework of best practices for every activity within the organization and helps to provide visibility on the processes to decision makers. With this kind of systems in place, the business should be in a better position to identify

opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs. These advantages should ultimately enable the business to give a better value proposition to the customer. The challenge is that implementation takes so much time and can be so expensive, that the benefits are not immediately obvious, and do not trickle down to the rightful beneficiaries, the consumer; in a timely manner. Here again, technological development provides, the answer. In more recent times, we have seen the development of cloud computing or accounting and even the development of such systems as the Google business tools. These systems take advantage of the increase in speed and power of computing that have developed over the years and allow companies and even SMEs, who want the advantages of an integrated system, implemented at speed and considerable lower cost, the opportunity to streamline their activities, eliminate waste and delight their customers. References. Galani,D., Gravas, E., Stavropoulos, A.,2010. The Impact of ERP Systems on Accounting Processes. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 42 2010. Scapens, R.W. and Jazayeri, M., 2003, ERP systems and management accounting change: opportunities or impacts? A research note, European Accounting Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp.201-233. Spathis, C. and Constantinides, S., 2004, Enterprise resource planning systems impact on accounting processes, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2004, pp. 234-247