Many organizations have implemented ERP systems; however, the level of success associated with these systems has varied widely. In the late 1990s, many of these systems were implemented to eliminate the ‘Y2K’ crises. Unfortunately, some of these implementations only focused on replacing the financial reporting systems and ignored the benefits that could have been obtained through the design and implementation of a system that integrated the operations of the entire organization (i.e. including accounting, manufacturing, supply chain management, etc.). The lack of integration and subsequent required upgrades (to ensure that the software will continue to be supported by the vendor), along with business combinations has Management Accounting in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems resulted in most of the early ERP adopting firms re-implementing their ERP environments. Some were simply upgrades, whereas others were essentially a complete, new ERP implementation project. It is commonly accepted by the business world that information technology should be viewed as more than just an automation of business processes; information technology can fundamentally change the way business is done. Many organizations, therefore, seek to improve their competitiveness by utilizing advanced information technology, such as ERP systems. However, consistent with the argument made by Carr (2003), research indicates that organizations generally do not obtain any long-lived competitive advantage through an ERP system implementation, any benefit obtained is quickly competed away. However, this is not to say that organizations should not implement ERP systems – those that do not soon find themselves loosing ground to organizations that have successfully implemented these systems (Poston and Grabski, 2001; Hunton et al., 2003). The implementation and subsequent operation of an ERP system is not an easy task. Without sound management of the implementation process, and without the identification of the changes an enterprise must undergo during operation, ERP systems can result in many difficulties for organizations (see Cameron and Meyer, 1998; Davenport, 1998; Deutsch, 1998). As argued in Grabski et al. (2001), ERP systems are different from traditional systems in scale, complexity, organizational impact, cost and subsequent business impact. ERP systems typically impact the entire organization and are almost always associated with the business process re-engineering (Davenport, 2000). Traditional analyzing and design projects had minimal re-engineering and the software was written to match current processes, whereas ERP systems are implemented with minimal change to the software while significant re-engineering of business processes to match the ERP software occurs. Organizations that implement ERP must be ready to do so and many have run into difficulty because they were not organised in the correct fashion to benefit from the implementation (Yusuf et al., 2004). The costs associated with ERP systems are significantly higher than those of traditional systems and mistakes such as these can be extremely costly – for example, Dell Computers spent millions of dollars on an ERP system that had to be scrapped as it was too rigid for the expanding nature of the company (Turnick, 1999). In some cases, a failed implementation can destroy the organization, as in the case of the FoxMeyer Drugs bankruptcy (Scott, 1999).
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