Contribution of ERP to the decision-making process through knowledge management

This research explores how knowledge management influences the contribution of enterprise resource planning (ERP) to the decision-making process. An immersion experience including a two-month observation and 24 in-depth interviews was conducted in two North African small and medium-sized industries (SMIs) which used the same ERP. The knowledge creation spiral of Nonaka and Konno (1998) has been applied to both of them. Accordingly, one of the SMIs had some good practices of knowledge management while the other lacked any. Results show that the good practices of knowledge management favour a suitable use of ERP, and consequently lead to an undeniable improvement of the decision-making process. However, practices carried out haphazardly cause fruitless use of ERP, therefore hampering any contribution to the decision-making process. The paper suggests a parallelism between ERP, the decision-making process and knowledge management.

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