Taking Knowledge Management on the ERP road: A two-dimensional analysis

In today´s fierce business competition, companies face the tremendous challenge of expanding markets, improving their products, services and processes and exploiting their intellectual capital in a dynamic network of knowledge-intensive relations inside and outside their borders. In order to accomplish these objectives, more and more companies are turning to the Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP). On the other hand, Knowledge Management (KM) has received considerable attention in the last decade and is continuously gaining interest by industry, enterprises and academia. As we are moving into an era of “knowledge capitalism”, knowledge management will play a fundamental role in the success of today´s businesses. This paper aims at throwing light on the role of KM in the ERP success first and on their possible integration second. A wide range of academic and practitioner literature related to KM and ERP is reviewed. On the basis of this review, the paper gives answers to specific research questions and analyses future research directions.