develop new knowledge in financial accounting and new skills to manage complex system.
Besides Enterprise Resource Planning generates a great quantity of information which accountants can use in order to better understand the whole firm supporting decision making
process .
Some researchers emphasize, in particular, the relevance of a successful implementation of an IS solution and its relationship with the management accountants role.
Indeed, authors find that under a useful and successful Enterprise Resource Planning, management accountants can enrich their activities, as they have more time to do other.
Instead if the Enterprise Resource Planning has some deficiencies, the authors argue that the accountants have to increase their tasks in order to support the problems created by the Information System application.
For this reason the utilization of an Enterprise Resource Planning in a firm can shift the role of accountants from processing information to analysis, even if their responsibility cannot change due to an Enterprise Resource Planning implementation .
Operative changes in management accountants due to the Enterprise Resource Planning can be divided in two categories: Direct effects and indirect ones .
With reference to the first kind of impacts , some authors underline that the Information Technology solution is able to automatically produce reports, streamlining the accountants work and increasing the timeliness of information dissemination.
Regarding the indirect impacts, the most common ones can be expressed as the introduction of an internal audit function, the use of non-financial performance indicators and profitability analysis at segmental/product level .
3 The Research Question
The examined literature focuses on the impacts of the Enterprise Resource Planning in general context without considering specific manufacturing systems: most of the contributions refer to the Enterprise Resource Planning in large organizations and more recently to small/medium enterprises .
Few contributions focus on the implementation of integrated Information Technology solutions in the engineer-to-order business .
The features of an engineer-to-order system, above described, and in particular the lack of products standardization makes difficult to implement and to utilize a generic information system, as shown in many contributions that highlight the failure of the manufacturing resource planning production control system to effectively manage an engineer-to-order system .
Uncertainty, dynamics and complexity of engineer-to-order systems make inapplicable the information systems based on the features of the more standardized manufacturing
systems, like make to stock .
From previous considerations it emerges that in the engineer-to-order companies the quotation phase is the most pivotal one.
We believe that the implementation of the integrated Information Technology solution in this crucial phase can bring significant advantages, especially in reducing: