Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Opportunities, Benefits and Implementation Challenges in Bangladesh

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a software system used by organizations to manage and integrate the core functions like manufacturing, finance, human resources, supply chain, and customer management of their business processes in a unified system which has been proved to be a vital instrument for improving operational efficiency, reducing manual work, enhancing data accuracy and thus facilitates timely and accurate decision-making which help an organization to adapt and craft an appropriate proactive response to evolving challenges and problems of today's changing market trends, rising customer expectations, and growing global competition. With this backdrop, the aim of this study is to know the status of available opportunities that create facilitating conditions for effective ERP implementation in Bangladesh and the resulting benefits of ERP implementation as well as the challenges of ERP implementation in Bangladeshi enterprises. This paper used secondary data sources that include browsing internet databases like Google scholar, emerald, web of science, and research gate to find research papers, articles, and study materials on ERP. The study reveals that supportive policies of government, increasing technological infrastructure, growing IT expertise, financial support from different financial institutions create major opportunities for ERP implementation in Bangladesh. Moreover, improved efficiency, centralized information systems, facilitating better decision-making, automatic process identified as the major benefits of adopting ERP and cost constraint, resource constraint, inadequate IT infrastructure, organizational resistance, customization challenges, vendor dependency are the prime challenges of implementing ERP system in Bangladeshi organizations. Finally, the paper proposes some suggestions to overcome the challenges.