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

a r t i c l e i n f o 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. After many years of improving the effectiveness of internal operations, organisations are now focusing on improving processes across supply chains [2,78]. The number of organisations consciously participating in supply chains has grown dramatically in the last decade [27,83]. Successful supply chain management (SCM) often depends on the extent of support provided by organisation-wide information systems (ISs) such as enterprise systems Delone and Mclean state that it is critical to measure IS performance in order to better understand the value and efficacy of management actions and IS investments. The practical problem that motivated this study is that, despite significant investments being made in ES and in SCM, knowledge of how well an ES supports SCM is sparse [81,91]. Support given by ES to SCM is not often measured and therefore not optimised [2,11,29,70, 91]. We could not find any suitable non-intrusive, customisable and easy to use tool available that enabled comprehensive measurement of such support, whilst providing diagnostics to inform which process points in an ES must be strengthened. ES are organisation-wide IS that are integrated across organisational functions [1,2,20]. These systems have evolved from isolated transaction processing …