Business benefits from enterprise systems implementation in small and medium-sized enterprises
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Date
2009
DOI
Open Access Location
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Australasian Association for Information Systems, and Australian Computer Society
Rights
AJIS publishes open-access articles distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial and Attribution License which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and AJIS are credited. All other rights including granting permissions beyond those in the above license remain the property of the author(s).
Abstract
The market for enterprise systems (ES) continues to grow as business becomes increasingly global and competitive. Increasingly, the market focus for ES vendors is on small businesses. The purpose of this study is to provide a unique ES vendor/consultant perspective on (a) the business benefits small and medium-sized organisations (SMEs) expect from their ES investment and (b) to examine current practices of ES implementation in SMEs through a conceptual framework that considers the organisational, process and strategic context of the implementation. This study does so with interview data collected from ES vendors, ES consultants and IT research firms, who are the key players in the New Zealand ES industry. A distinctive contribution of this research is the vendor/consultant perspective as the unit of analysis, rather than the SME perspective commonly used in similar research. The vendor/consultant perspective offers a comprehensive viewpoint that extends across numerous SMEs in a variety of industries. Findings from interviews with these professionals indicate that although many ES implementations are several years old now, SMEs have only recently started tracking benefits through analytical processes in expectation to realise business value from their ES investment. The results also identify how ES implementation practices are adapting to be more suitable to the SME sector, an important market for ES vendors given the saturation of the large enterprise market for ES implementation.
Description
Keywords
Enterprise System (ES), Enterprise Resourace Planning (ERP), business benefits, implementation practices, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)
Citation
Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 2009, 16 (1), pp. 31 - 50