This ‘‘ERP movement’’ was initially motivated by the combination of their ability to meet various companies’ requirements both on technical and organisational point of view. Often listed among these requirements is the difficulty of evolution of legacy systems with regards to the Y2K threshold or euro-compliancy in Europe; the interest of a unique system in comparison with non-homogeneous software packages; the necessity to efficiently gather, store, process and dispatch information within the entire company; or the needs of financial consolidation. In the meantime, new information technology opportunities appeared: generalisation of networks, increased power of computers and data bases, etc., which made possible the design of comprehensive information systems After over a decade of applications, it is still clear that ERP implementation and use lead not only to technical problems but also to organizational, social and economical issues, which may have a critical influence on the future of companies if not properly addressed. Even if these difficulties have been considered for a long time in the research literature, it is interesting to notice the difficulties of this literature to achieve a real prospective work, in an area where firms and ERP vendors have their own, and often quicker dynamics.With regards to this difficulty,the ambition of this special issue of Computers in Industry is to provide a representative and clear picture of more and more active research axis linked to the problematic of implementation and use of ERP systems in industry, both on theoretical and practical point of view. The first article by V. Botta-Genoulaz, P.-A. Millet and B. Grabot gives an overview on the most recent literature on the subject: indeed, time constraints related to the writing and reviewing process result in that the state-of-the-art proposed in each contribution are mainly based on communications published until 2003, whereas the number of articles published on ERP systems shows each year an exponential increase. Therefore, it has seemed of interest to specifically focus this first position paper on the trends, which can be identified according to the most recent research literature on the subject (more precisely published in 2003 and 2004). The other articles of this special issue have been selected in order to illustrate various trends in the literature on ERP systems, not only within the computer science community but also from the economics, social or human sciences community’s perspectives.Researchers may adopt two extreme behaviours when facing industrial problems, which can often be found in the literature on ERP. They may first behave as actors, operationally involved in projects and trying as a consequence to solve problems through actions. They may also be an observer, which is often the case for sociologists, trying to understand and explain what they see without direct interference.