Project Portfolio Management and Enterprise Resource Management: Merging Technologies?

Most enterprises are trying to expand their business, hence aiming to increase turnover and profit. The challenge is to win potentially profitable contracts and to "create value" to best serve the needs and expectation of customers and other stakeholders. A second challenge is to establish an ongoing process of "capability and capacity expansion" in the enterprise to improve long-term sustainability. A third challenge companies face is to effectively and efficiently identify and utilise scarce and expensive enterprise resources to achieve these value creation and capability establishment objectives. Exploratory research is being done regarding project-based industries and process-based industries addressing the above-mentioned challenges. Enterprise-wide management approaches, processes, trends and tools are investigated. The "business process" with required resources plays a pivotal role in process-oriented industries and a typical management approach followed is Enterprise Resources Management (ERM) or similar with associated tools. In the project-oriented business the "project" and currently Project Portfolio Management is used as management approach supported by PPM tools. However, these two types of business are not pure process or project-based anymore, but are becoming a combination of project and process. This leads to challenging developments and could have a far-reaching effect on how businesses are perceived, managed and tools used.