An ERP implementation case study in the South African retail sector

Abstract

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an ever-growing software used globally and in all sectors of business to increase productivity and efficiency, however, the south African market does not show any symptoms that it needs such facilities as we tangle the whys and how’s on this case study. We use previous studies from the literatures that show an ever-thriving sector such as the South African retail can continue to thrive in the absence of ERP and remain relevant and the biggest market contributors as they have been for the past decades. We focus our sources from year 2020 to 2022 to further influence our case to openly clarify the question of the implementation of ERP system. Our studies settle the unanswered question of the implement ability of an ERP system in the retail sector by exploring both functioning and failed installations and how those were resolved, the effectiveness, efficiency and productivity in the absence and presence of ERP system in place in similar economies such as the South African retail sector, both in the past and present times. The south African retail sector has adopted expensive and difficult to maintain ERP systems, which has a drastic increased improvement in the productivity together with the risks of failure. Such risks were witnessed with Shoprite closing doors in Botswana, Nigeria, and Namibia, this has been proof in failure of expensive and fully paid enterprise resource planning that still failed in more than one country. Our solutions consist of methodology contributed an easy to implement solutions to the retail sectors and can be adapted for different purpose, the integration between large retailers and our system would save millions, time and resources.