NOVEL APPROACH TO COMPARE OF AN ESTABLISHED OPEN-SOURCE ERP AND A NEXT GENERATION CLOUD COMPUTING ERP

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to compare two ERP softwares - one traditional open source involving IT infrastructure (servers, technicians, PC) at users end (A) and the other cloudcomputing which needs only PC and internet connection at the users end (B). It seeks to find their relative strengths and weaknesses. It uses and analyses data from user - traffic websites to achieve this end. Results indicate that 'A' is more well - established and popular than 'B' but, 'B' with a growing user - base is catching up very fast. But, both types of software should hold their ground in the market in the future. There are pros and cons with both the software.Keywords: ERP, cloud computing, website comparison, open source softwareINTRODUCTION:ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) softwares have become a key feature of businesses to integrate various functions across the organizations. There are lots of definitions for ERP in the literature. Many of the definitions for ERP focus on such properties of ERP as integrating processes, enabling optimization across the organization, elimination of complex links between computer systems, providing a common IT infrastructure, linking through the supply chain, adapting best industry and management practices for providing the right product at the right place at the right cost, tracking the status of a company's day-to-day activities, achieving consistency and efficiency through standardization, enhancing of market value and firm performance through efficiency and effectiveness gains, providing a quicker response to customer requirements and creating common measures ([1]Hirt and Swanson, 1999; [2]Rao, 2000; [3]Bendoly and Jacobs, 2004; [4]Hunton et al., 2003; [5]Moller, 2005). [6]Hsu and Chen (2004) discussed the importance of ERP into an integrated, process-oriented, informationdriven and real time organization where Sarkis and Gunasekaran [7] (2003) stressed the effects of ERP on competition. Boykin and Martz [8] (2004) emphasized that ERP systems forced the organization from a taskoriented approach to the newer process view. Besides, Davenport and Brooks [9] (2004) emphasized that enterprise systems are main drivers to apply a cross-functional process management. Buoanno et al. [10] (2005) explained the effect of business process concept as promoting cooperation and convergence of efforts among managers. Al-Mashari and Zairi [11] (2000) suggested that processes and systems and their integration in business strategy, structure and culture should be realized in ERP projects.ERP softwares are notorious for their large size & huge databases. They tend to slow down desktops & laptops sold to the general public because these computers have limited RAM capacity for portability purposes.In many cases, computers loaded with ERP softwares are huge mainframe computers.This has lead to many vendors offering their services on the cloud, that is, software as a service (SAAS). One of the ERP vendors of the study, is such an example. The other vendor offers services for free in two ways - SAAS or as an executable file of the ERP software that can be downloaded from their website. The comparison of the 2 softwares is based on the user- traffic to their websites where(A) Traditional open-source ERP software or its website(B) Cloud-computing ERP software or its website.Referred henceforth as 'A' and 'B' onlyLITERATURE REVIEW:The existing approaches to comparison of ERP softwares tend to measure their performance from financial performance metrics such as return on investment, net present value, or payback period ([12] Kivijarvi and Saarinen, 1995; [13] Murphy and Simon, 2001), but it is difficult to do so unless it is supplemented with subjective measures. In some cases, user satisfaction measurement questionnaires and methods for emplyees, middle managers, top managers and system engineers have also been applied to real cases ([14] Doll and Torkzadeh, 1988; [15] Klenke, 1992; [16] Saarinen, 1996; [17] Wu et al. …