The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, UK, has launched a major initiative called the Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) as they feel the full potential of current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is not utilized in today’s business decision making, says a news release. SEM will be mainly supported by the products already available in the market such as SAP’s Business Warehouse, Oracle’s Intelligent Webhouse and Peoplesoft’s Enterprise Warehouse.

Traditionally, ERP systems have focused on improving transactional data collection and cost reduction at an operational level. In contrast, SEM is designed to improve the effectiveness of strategic management processes by providing managers with business performance monitoring, consolidation, and data warehousing/business intelligence capability.

CIMA is planning to invest in a range of research and development activities relating to SEM. The technologies that enable SEM will continue to evolve and it is likely that the next two years will see a growing number of ERP vendors and niche software firms offering SEM capability. In the long term, CIMA believes that sustainable competitive advantage from SEM will arise neither from the adoption of widely available software nor from techniques. More important will be each management team’s success in adapting the technologies and techniques to the unique operating environment and decision-making culture of their own organization.

CIMA is carrying out a survey to benchmark how ready companies are to implement SEM. CIMA sees this as a platform for its work on SEM and would make use of the overall results to develop products and services to meet ‘your business needs.’