While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

This article evaluates the perception of executives working in the area of supply chain management and ERP towards the role of ERP in improving supply chain effectiveness.The study is conducted on about 20 executives working with the automobile, tyre manufacturing and pharmaceutical firms. Findings from this exploratory study are twofold. First, the main finding of experts/SCM members' experiences is that, ERP positively contributes towards some parameters of supply chain effectiveness. The second finding of this study has emerged as some limitations of the current ERP system and do not contribute in supply chain effectiveness.

Supply chain management has been defined as the art of managing the flow of materials and products from source to user as well as the related flow of information, and finds that it records and controls materials management. Supply chain is the sum total of all the activities arrived at fullfilling the customer's request. It consists of all people who are involved in fullfilling the customer's request, profitably right from the supplier to the retailer (Capcino, 1998). Automobile firms in the 1970s and 1980s often tied vendors and retail outlets together to gain production efficiency. Today, computer technology makes it possible to obtain many benefits through coordination across organizations. With the advent of ERP system, working with the communication technology, the efficiency of supply chain management has increased. Markets are becoming more transparent, customer friendly (Pepper and Rogers, 1999; Jensen, 1999) and in general, the rate of change in the business world is increasing (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998 Gleick, 1999). The most important thing to motivate manufacturing firms to implement ERP has been to improve interaction with the suppliers and customers (Mabert et. al, 2000). Thus, ERP has a role in supporting supply chain activities.

In the present scenario, supplying defect free products is not the competitive advantage but is a requirement to make place in the market (Bowersox and Closs, 1996). They argued that to be effective, firms must expand their integrated behavior to incorporate customers and suppliers. For planning and monitoring processes, information should be shared among channel members (Ellram and Cooper, 1993). Effective supply chain also requires mutual sharing of channel risks and rewards that yield a competitive advantage (Ellram and Copper, 1998). Effective management of supply chain requires conscious management of factors influencing inventory requirement, policies and procedures that control the movement and storage of inventories on SCM and customer service (Bhakar et al., 2002). Further, they argued that organizations should improve SCM orientation to achieve supply chain effectiveness.

Role of ERP in Improving Supply Chain Effectiveness: A Perceptual Study, supply chain management, supply chain effectiveness, products, Markets, materials management, supply chain activities, competitive advantage, Effective management, inventory requirement, policies and procedures.