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Top1. Introduction
Companies are running into an unidentifiable rush in this dramatically changing business environment to constantly fit themselves with increasing competition and gaining a competitive edge through dodging deadlines. As more and more companies are joining hands while collaborating with the other companies, they turn to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to facilitate information flow among different functional departments. ERP refers to a system that helps plan the company's resources and manage the manufacturing, financial services, supply chain management, and integrating the core business activities. These systems help businesses simplify various activities of managing projects and their risks, maintaining customer relations, and compliance with other activities. They also help provide findings related to data that give a fair view on how the resources should be managed to improve business performance and run businesses with minimal costs. These systems reduce the manual work of syncing data, thus improving the business's efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, these systems track customer interactions, which help understand the choices and needs of the customers.
An ERP system establishes and lays down standards of human resource planning that reduce the time for doing work, cost-cutting, skill management, and reporting across HR, finance, and supply chain management areas. In addition, it optimizes the integration of data across multi-functional areas by streamlining business processes and eliminating unnecessary data from the system (Ali & Miller, 2017).
ERP system and its applications have been seen in most of the established firms and businesses. However, ERP systems are much needed in the gig sector to clean the cluttered screens and improve the interaction and communication between them to become productive and effective with their work. To meet the need of the gig workers and the customers who wish to connect even at late hours, ERP systems are accessible using any device with internet connections, SSL, and strong encryption that ensures the data's safety. The data remains secure in the cloud from any hacking to take place and is tailored depending upon the nature of the work for maximum efficiency. It helps communicate and integrate the data between the applications through different methods used in one comprehensive information system (Khalil, 2020). They help save the resources from wasting time training them on complex business tools by simplifying their work through data integration.
HR professionals commonly use ERP systems in managing attendance & leave management, application screening, deciding payrolls, setting targets by accumulating data into its cloud systems, thus saving a lot of paperwork and analysis (Freitas, 2018). HR professionals consider gig workers as a beneficial source of income. They can choose these experts from a specialized pool of experts wanting to work with the least training & development expenses. But it gets challenging to manage and select these gig workers from many independent & contingent professionals. Since gig workers are clueless about how the organization functions, HR professionals need to trust their recruitment strategies to hire them on a contractual basis. With the emergence of tech-driven platforms, the right talent is hired and monitored through these ERP systems.
For example, the customers of Zomato and Swiggy can provide instant feedback through these ERP systems, which then helps in storing slice & dice of data in their cloud systems and gauging the customers' reviews to predict the pockets of shortcomings in the delivery systems. The software works on the automation, integration, and collation of informative data in a single repository (Kamath & Sarkar, 2020), which stores online testimonials and ratings from the customers for these gig workers, which helps draw talent towards the gig platforms.
Extant literature specifies the increase in ERP systems usage for better and faster work structures (Uddin et al., 2020). Moreover, work primarily led by the ERP systems helps in the automation of labor and individualization in the workplace as it helps eliminate unnecessary surveillance. As gig workers can work from any corner of the world, they are hired with standardized specifications. However, the workspace is more on the cloud these days, where ERP systems have become like a trojan horse trying to bring efficiency in the commoditization of labor (Kamath & Sarkar, 2020).