Includes bibliographical reference and index

1. Introduction -- 2. Enterprise resource planning in the IT industry -- 3. Operational support and enterprise systems -- 4. Entrepreneurship and business planning -- 5. Public enterprise management -- 6. Human resource management: policies and practices -- 7. Role of micro enterprises in economic development -- 8. Successful immigrant planning of entrepreneurs -- 9. New immigrant planning of entrepreneurs.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is defined as the ability to deliver an integrated suite of business applications. ERP tools share a common process and data model, covering broad and deep operational end-to-end processes, such as those found in finance, HR, distribution, manufacturing, service and the supply chain. Information in large organizations is often spread across numerous homegrown computer systems, housed in different functions or organizational units. While each of these "information islands" can ably a specific business activity, enterprise wide performance is hampered by the lack of integrated information. Further, the maintenance of these systems can results in substantial costs. For example, many of the older programmes cannot properly handle dates beyond the year 2000, and they must be fixed at a steep cost or replaced. While the Y2K bug has been fixed over time, the lack of integration is a pervasive problem.