An Empirical Investigation of Factors Affecting ERP Impact

Introducing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in an organisation often has far-reaching impacts. However the expected ERP benefits have not always materialised. When implementing ERP, most companies choose the less expensive route of modifying their business processes to fit the ERP system, but this route is not necessarily the most optimal one. This paper investigates the specific impact of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on business processes by using nine critical success factors identified in the literature as independent variables, including team composition, top management support, project champion, communication and training. Twenty-two ERP implementations were used to analyze the impact of these variables. Despite the small sample, some interesting findings emerge although not many were fully conclusive. However, the latter finding may caution practitioners and academics about making blanket recommendations of changing all business processes to fit the ERP system.