Comprehensive Marketplace and Factors Affecting the Budget of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in Sri Lanka

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an enterprise with an extensive information system that integrates and controls all business functions and processes in the entire organization. It is an essential and popular tool for large-scale organizations and is currently extended to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). In the early days, a good demand prevailed for individual packages, such as payroll, stock control, material management, human resource management, and inventory control systems; but now it is a collection of packages as a whole system. Types and scale of business organizations have customized their products to fulfil the requirements. The complexity of the business process is a significant factor that creates a rigorous marketplace, while competitiveness among businesses leads to the expenditure of vast amounts of money to maintain such business automated systems. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the marketplace and the endeavour to maintain ERP within the Sri Lankan domain, in comparison with the global scenario. Due to the close saturation of ERP adoptions in large enterprises, ERP vendors now focus more on SMEs. Moreover, due to globalization, partnerships, value networks, and the widespread information flow across and within SMEs currently, more SMEs are adopting ERP systems. The risks of adoption relate to the fact that SMEs have limited resources and specific characteristics that make their case different from large enterprises. This research has been based on 80 leading business organizations in Sri Lanka catering to local and foreign trade, manufacturing, commerce, banking, and hotel services