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educe material waste as well as labour costs. Also, the new process could reduce the time for set ups for different product runs, and thus enable the capture of special orders where quick response is necessary. As IRR/NPV analysis is incremental, the spreadsheet would show the incremental cash flows for capital outlays, reduced material costs, reduced labour costs, and the contribution from the additional sales. However, the data items on the spreadsheet of pre-ERP capital budgeting are not explicitly linked with what activities happened, what activities are happening, or what activities will happen in the future. This separateness can be resolved by ERP systems integrating capital budgeting with companies’ accounting and other systems. 3.2 Benefits of ERP for capital budgeting decisions Potentially, capital budgeting can be done significantly differently with a functioning ERP system because of the integration of accounting and other systems. The common unified data warehouse is able to integrate, for example, financial transactions, activities in activity-based costing (ABC) and activity-based management (ABM) sub-systems, budgets and plans, and performance measures such as customer satisfaction or an entire balanced scorecard. Of course for these expectations to be realized, companies would need to have a full range of ERP modules, which may be presently uncommon. Consider how ERP systems impact capital budgeting in its three stages, (1) preparation and approval, (2) operational, and (3) post audit. During the first stage, the ERP system will allow the revenue and cost items to be linked to actual activities. For example with new equipment, if some of the costs are labour, the actual model for labour use in manufacturing will be assessed and improvements in labour productivity due to the new asset will be modelled. Modelling allows alternative approaches or variants to be tested and understood. Similarly, if there is a change in material usage, this will be modelled and the impact considered in the capital project evaluation. In effect, ERP systems allow capital projects to be modelled as mini independent businesses or investment centres. For the second operational stage, the models used in the first stage, preparation and approval can be compared to the actual model in use regarding labour, material, and asset input and the actual outputs. In effect, the modelled assumptions can be explicitly validated with experience. Similarly, for the third stage at or near the end of the project the models can be assessed to do a post audit to determine the life-time success of the project and to provide feedback on the capital budgeting process. As with capital budgeting, the impact of ERP systems could be deductively specified, or more precisely conjectured for other management accounting practices such as budgeting, operational statements, forecasting, performance measurement, and costing. The above capital budgeting example indicates that ERP systems have the potential to lead to greater integration, accuracy, speed, and effectiveness. As management accounting techniques involve company information, it would be reasonable to expect, from the implementation of ERP systems, improvements at least in integration, accuracy, speed, and effectiveness, if not a major change such as the elimination of budgeting. 3.2 Research Design Most of the earlier research on the impact of ERP systems on management accounting have been fi