In Tom Friedman's book the World is Flat, he lists 10 flatteners, During another keynote by Shai Aggasi , he added SAP as another flatnner, Aberdeen Group genralised it and have come up with a report titled "What role does ERP play in Globalization?"

While globalization was once the exclusive domain of large multi-billion dollar companies,today even small to medium size enterprises cannot escape the issues associated with global trade and offshore manufacturing. Whether you view the world as flat or round, it is definitely shrinking. North American and European companies have been challenged by the introduction of lower priced products coming into their markets from countries with inexpensive labor, causing the trend in recent years toward offshore manufacturing operations and the procurement of materials from low cost country sources (LCCS), which in turn introduces a higher level of complexity into the supply chain.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a mission critical component of any globalization strategy. Yet this is often overlooked while focus is concentrated on supply chain issues. As a result, the majority of companies today still rely on some element of manual effort and/or spreadsheets in order to consolidate financial reporting and fulfill global trade management, legal and reporting requirements

The report focusses on:

How much are enterprises relying on ERP to effectively manage global operations and how much is still being done manually and with spreadsheets? Or not being
effectively managed at all?
Are multi-national financial management and trade management features available to them and have they implemented these features?
Do they centralize ERP or manage a globally distributed environment?
What priorities do enterprises place on the various elements of global ERP?
What plans do companies have in terms of extending or enhancing ERP in support of globalization?

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai