Building and evaluating ESET: A tool for assessing the support given by an enterprise system to supply chain management

摘要

Modern organisations must effectively manage their supply chains, to exist and grow. Supply chains draw information extensively from enterprise systems (ESs) of participating businesses. Despite that supply chains frequently depend on information from ES to succeed, not much research on measuring the effectiveness of information transfers between these systems has been published. This paper describes the building and evaluation of a flexible decision support tool that evaluates the impact an ES has on supply chain management (SCM), thereby filling a gap in the SCM assessment portfolio of tools. The main purpose of the Enterprise System Evaluating Tool (ESET), is to measure the support given by ES to SCM and identify process points at which such support fails. Thus ESET empowers organisations with knowledge to improve their supply chain performance by modifying and/or enhancing the ES. A case study based approach was used to evaluate ESET to ascertain its utility by applying it in two Fortune 100 organisations within one industry. In future research, ESET will be applied across many industries, to quantitatively evaluate ESET and refine it further. Analytics on data gathered from these organisations may then enlighten researchers and practitioners on the current state of support given by ES to SCM.