Benefits and challenges of Enterprise Resource Planning for Pakistani SMEs

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is used to combine all the functions happening inside the organization with the help of one software. All the data is centralized which makes it easy to manage information for all participants. The literature on ERP is studied thoroughly the whole process of adoption till the implementation and final evaluations. But studies that focus on small and medium sized enterprises are limited in number when compared to the large scale enterprises. In case of Pakistan, research is very limited. In this thesis, the author tries to analyze the current status of SMEs usage of ERP system. The benefits obtained and challenges faced by SMEs of Pakistan are studied. Framework presented by Shang and Seddon (2000) is used to understand the benefits obtained by the SMEs in Pakistan. This is a comprehensive framework that classifies the benefits obtained by the ERP adoption, into five categories: operational benefits, managerial benefits, Strategic benefits, IT benefits, and Organizational benefits. The results show that SMEs of Pakistan are also getting many benefits after adoption of ERP. Most of the firms had implemented SAP software. Operational benefits were mentioned by all the firms. The most important benefits were report generation, quick access to critical information, better product and cost planning. Respondents also mentioned that they had reduced corruption as a result of ERP implementation. It is also an important benefit considering high corruption rate in Pakistan. Along with benefits, challenges faced by Pakistani SMEs included infrastructure problems like electricity, difficulties with integration of one module with other module, costs of adoption and lack of skilled ERP consultants. Further studies in this regard can be conducted on cloud based ERP which is fast growing all around the world

Domestic workers as political subjects: desire, political subjectivation and everyday lives of Islamabad's domestic workers

In mainstream discourses, there is virtually no conceptualisation of domestic workers or working-class women as political subjects. Moving beyond work/non-work binaries and challenging the equation of ‘political subjects’ with only those directly participating in collective, public mobilisations, this thesis conceptualises Islamabad’s women domestic workers as a group of subaltern political subjects who are invisibilised as workers, as women, as citizens, as city residents, and as political subjects in the realms of scholarship, policy, and organised politics in Pakistan and beyond. In doing so, it underscores the need for a serious accounting of the political subjectivities of these subjects as these often escape political radars and are thus rendered invisible in scholarship as well as political practice. Most of Islamabad’s domestic workers are part-time/live-out workers, low-caste working-class women living in Islamabad’s impoverished bastis (informal settlements) and working in the kothis (bungalows) of the city’s elite. Using ethnographic methods, this thesis tracks the conceptual vocabularies used by these domestic workers to describe and critique their everyday experiences in the kothi, in the basti and in their familial/intimate lives, giving an account of how they understand, navigate, and resist the multiple, co-constitutive forms of class, caste/religious, and gender domination experienced by them in the everyday, including the everyday threat of forced eviction from the bastis they live in. An understanding of these subaltern political subjects, this thesis argues, requires recognising them as desiring subjects who not only think and act but also feel and want. By documenting the critical vocabularies, practices, and political imaginaries of Pakistani domestic workers, an under-researched and multiply-marginalised group, this study contributes to the empirical and conceptual scholarship on the political subjectivities of subaltern groups in the global South. It revives a focus on Pakistan’s subordinate classes, highlights the importance of studying the ‘infra-political’ under politically and socially repressive conditions, and demonstrates that these gendered subalterns are active producers of structural critique who have quite different subjectivities from their male counterparts. In doing so, it hopes to expand the field of vision and action of the Pakistani Left and help forge new, more expansive, and robust working-class solidarities