Operational statistics and IT solutions : adding to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems

ERP Systems are developed to assist information management and analysis to organisations for gaining business advantage. Although ERP systems claim to produce competitive advantage for companies investing on ERP, it is still questionable (See [9]: Powell, 1997). This is also valid for IT in general. In this paper we introduce a process using Operational Statistics by which such competitive advantage will evolve and to show how managers and users can manage the IT resource to become a source of competitive advantage. The aim of this paper is to give an integrated approach to improve management systems that leads to competitive advantage by combining techniques of the three disciplines operations research, statistics and computing/IT together. This has been achieved by addressing the need to integrate these disciplines in a greater level than it is done in the past. Further this paper introduces a novel approach in integrating operations research and statistics techniques namely Operational Statistics.