In the last years, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is being largely used by enterprises. They are presented as "the solution" for the enterprise's problems. They are generic systems able to integrate all the enterprise's informations through a single data base. The literature about this subject presents a series of positive results and benefits a firm could obtain with the systems' adoption. But the difficulties the enterprises face and the deep of changes to be realized for the achievement of the benefits are not clear to the firms, specially for the small businesses which do not have many resources to invest in technology. This paper has the objective to describe the result of a research on the adoption of ERP, by small business, opposing theoretical references and the enterprise practices.
Enterprise Resource Planning; small and medium enterprises; organizational change; integration; information systems
