Sustainable enterprise resource planning: imperatives and research directions

The world faces to the problem of integration between sustained business functions. The sustainability data is not sufficiently integrated and used for decision making. To solve this problem, organizations need information systems to facilitate their sustainability initiatives. In this study has been proposed Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning (S-ERP) system as a holistic solution to support sustainability initiatives. The paper highlights the significance of S-ERP system and provides its future research direction to guide the academic researchers. Two research areas are included - the ERP and sustainability, to discover how academicians and practitioners solved the problems of integration and sustainability. The S-ERP systems' life cycle and identified six key areas include: concept, system design, pre-implementation, implementation, post-implementation, and system extension/retirement have been defined. They distinguish number of broad research themes based on key areas. S-ERP system appears as a promising solution to solve integration problems in sustainability; however the academic researchers need to take certain direction for assisting organizations for solving their business issues. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.