PROPOSAL OF A CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE TO EVALUATE ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SYSTEMS (ERP)

The investments in Technology and Information Systems, among which there are the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, have become indispensable for companies to have better conditions to survive in competitive scenarios. To reach the benefits from its implementations, high investments in time, money, and internal resources are necessary. Because of these counterpoints, some studies tried do discuss the benefits generated by the adoption of ERP systems in regards to the investments necessary to such adoption. These studies applied different perspectives to evaluate the value of ERP systems, finding different results as well. It is necessary to understand how companies can, effectively, evaluate the value that the ERP systems are able to proportionate and the resulting differences of each evaluation. In this sense, this study aims to proportionate a conceptual structure of an evaluation of the value of ERP systems. For such analysis, this research was based on a qualitative and exploratory approach, with the use of review of literature as the method. As a result, a conceptual structure to evaluate the value of ERP systems that integrates different perspectives of evaluation of the value of these systems, thus demonstrating that, when using many perspectives of evaluation, any bias found in each perspective will be reduced or eliminated, which improves the evaluation and allows that the value generated by the ERP system to be fully recognized, thus avoiding that the attention is centered in financial indexes and in elements linked to the operation of corporations.