A aplicação do modelo de decisão da gestão econômica às decisões de investimento e manutenção de um sistema de gestão - ERP

Abstract

The continuously growing volume of resources invested in technology and, mainly, on ERP calls management software, has brought companies towards a step of making decisions in order to evaluate the results and benefits that are targeted and expected with the deployment of such solutions. With such objective, improvements on processes for measuring and evaluating the investments made to the implementation of these systems have been growing, most of the times influenced by the demands of managers and stockholders. In order to have the decision-making processes better performed the use of financial and economic managerial methods are part of the distinct solutions eligible. This paper has the main goal of collaborating in this sense and, by applying an economic standpoint, most precisely focusing the concepts of the economic management of assets, in order to bring a fruitful contribution to turn these companies able to obtain reliable information for making decisions, during the whole process, related to investments on ERP management software. Another objective of this project is to evaluate how the companies that utilize ERP systems assess the benefits and required investments for deploying the system, and this assessment is made through an empiric research, based on other researches, equally important, performed in the USA during 2002. The research has the objective of raising three points of major relevance, these being related to the demands that currently arise in the companies regarding these same investments - which decision-making groups are part of the approval processes of ERP systems' investments and which are the technicalities utilized by the companies to evaluate the return of investments (ROI) of such systems. The method utilized to perform this job was accomplished through an empiric and bibliographic research, which has allowed the theoretic fundamentals of the collected data, and the sampling of an example utilizing the financial management of fixed assets as a way of evaluating the investment options. Through the answers obtained with this research, as well as from the example, it was possible to verify that the companies, in general, although they use some evaluation methods, are not feeling comfortable with the results obtained, neither with the evaluation methods, which vary from company to company. There is also a certain fear regarding the information provided by the companies that provide ERP software related to the ROI amount that is calculated; that all exemplifies that there is still a wide field of action to be improved in terms of investments evaluation and ERP systems' maintenance.