Organisations and Vanilla Software: What Do We Know About ERP Systems and Competitive Advantage?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become a de facto standard for integrating business functions. But an obvious question arises: if every business is using the same socalled “Vanilla” software (e.g. an SAP ERP system) what happens to the competitive advantage from implementing IT systems? If we discard our custom-built legacy systems in favour of enterprise systems do we also jettison our valued competitive advantage from IT? While for some organisations ERPs have become just a necessity for conducting business, others want to exploit them to outperform their competitors. In the last few years, researchers have begun to study the link between ERP systems and competitive advantage. This link will be the focus of this paper. We outline a framework summarizing prior research and suggest two researchable questions. A future article will develop the framework with two empirical case studies from within part of the European food industry.