Predicting SMEs Willingness to Adopt ERP, CRM, SCM & E-Procurement Systems

The attention of software vendors has moved recently to Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) offering them a vast range of Enterprise Systems (ES) including ERP, CRM, SCM and E-Procurement systems, which were formerly adopted by large firms only. From reviewing the literature on the adoption and diffusion of Information Systems’ (IS) innovations, the question of ‘why some SMEs choose to adopt ES while seemingly similar others facing the same market conditions do not’ is still under-studied. This paper intends to fill this gap by developing a model that can be used to predict which SMEs are more likely to become adopters of ES. Using direct interviews, data was collected from 102 SMEs located in the Northwest of England. Logistic regression was used to analyse the data. Results reveal that factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of ES are different from factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of other previously studied IS innovations. SMEs were found to be more influenced by technological and organisational factors than environmental factors. Moreover, results indicate that firms with a greater perceived relative advantage, a greater ability to experiment with ES before adoption, a greater top management support, a greater organisational readiness and a larger size are predicted to become adopters of ES.