In the mid-1980s, several HarvardBusinessSchool cases and articles introduced Activity-Based Costing (ABC). Developed by Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper, ABC offered therapy for uncontrollable overhead. By using costing systems based on activities and cost drivers, it became easy to assign overhead to specific activities (Kaplan and Anderson 2003). The plausibility for an integration between ABC with other systems became popular in an attempt to develop it. The study by Shaw (1998) discussed the move by giant ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft of investing in ABC Technologies. Kaplan and Anderson (2003) introduced time-driven ABC that can be data fed from ERP systems, a model of ABC that is easier and can be extended to many company-wide applications. According to Somers and Nelson (2001), ERP systems attempt to integrate all departments and functions of a company into one single computer system. Beheshti (2006) explains how ERP systems enable organizations to analyze the value chain as a system, from suppliers to firm to customer and identify, improve, or eliminate poor and most costly areas of operation, as a result, increase the value of the processes in the value chain. Empirical work done during the current study, upon the pharmaceutical industry in Egypt in general and upon the Nile Company has supported our hypothesis regarding the necessity and importance of the integration between the ABC and ERP.

Keyword:ERP, ABC, BSC, SAP, Regression, Correlation

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