Spreadsheets in an ERP environment: not what the doctor ordered

TL;DR

This paper investigates the widespread use of spreadsheets in ERP systems, aiming to quantify their usage and identify factors that influence this behavior, highlighting a gap between enterprise tools and user preferences.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of spreadsheet usage in ERP environments and explores the factors that encourage users to prefer spreadsheets over built-in reporting tools.

Findings

Spreadsheets are extensively used alongside ERP systems.

User familiarity influences the choice of reporting tools.

Factors facilitating spreadsheet use include ease of use and flexibility.

Abstract

Modern ERP systems contain flexible report generators but the tendency exists for users to export data to spreadsheets for manipulation, reporting and decision making. A purported reason for this is that some users are more familiar with personal reporting tools (spreadsheets) as opposed to enterprise reporting tools. The author's doctoral research intends to measure the extent of spreadsheet usage in ERP environments and to determine which factors facilitate this.