Article Details

An Analysis upon Various Conceptual Models for Implementation of Cloud Based ERP System in Small and Medium Enterprises | Original Article

Rituraj Jain*, Manaullah Abid Husain, Vikas S. Chauhan, in International Journal of Information Technology and Management | IT & Management

ABSTRACT:

The Small and Medium Enterprise industry is experiencing a major transformation towards cloud ERP systems. These systems can organize, and maintain data remotely, accept a pay-as-you- use method and enhance related information through a cloud computing platform. Hence, this makes the cloud ERP system crucial for their sustainability and enables them to become competitive in the market. However, the adoption rate of cloud ERP among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has been recorded as slightly low compared to other enterprise systems like Customer Relationship Management. This could be attributed to unclear adoption factors among SMEs and the lack of a theoretical model that can enhance the predictive power to adopt a cloud ERP system. Present Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) offers expensive models which are hard to implement in Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) due to budget limitations. Moreover, current ERP systems are associated with several issues such as mutual synchronization of multi-typed resources, limited customization, bulky upgrading cost, solution integration, industry functionality, backup hedge and technology updates. These issues render ERP systems implementation painful, complex and time consuming and generate the necessity of a massive change in ERP framework to enhance ERP systems infrastructure and functionality. Cloud Computing (CC) platforms possess the ability to overcome ERP systems discrepancies with cost-effective, customized and highly available computing resources. The goal of this research is to merge ERP and CC benefits together to reduce the factor of expenditure cost and implementation delays through a proposed framework. For this purpose, we firstly analyze the prominent issues in current ERP systems through a comprehensive comparison between ERP before and after moving to CC environment. Secondly, we propose a generic framework for “Cloud-based ERP systems” in favor of SME. The proposed framework follows multi-instance based cloud infrastructure that initiates different ERP instances for different industries.