Literature Review

The revolution in computing and information technology has facilitated the design and implementation of effective management accounting systems. ERP systems, as one of today’s popular information technologies in the changing business environment, support ‘modern’ management accounting techniques such as activity-based costing (ABC), activity-based budgeting (ABB), product lifecycle costing and balanced scorecard (BSC). In addition, the promise of integrated, flexible, real-time financial and operating information offered by these systems addresses many of the traditional criticisms of management accounting systems raised by Kaplan (1984; 1986) and his colleagues (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987; Cooper and Kaplan, 1992). For instance, Johnson (1994: 261) argues that traditional management accounting information became ‘too distorted, too aggregated and too late to help managers control operations’. Accordingly, implementation of ERP system can be described as ‘a change agent’ (Granlund and Malmi, 2002).