Commercial ERP Systems and User Productivity: A Study Across European SMEs

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and productivity aspects are currently experiencing an increasing interest from both the academic and business communities. In this study we aim to measure how firms perceived the impact of their ERP systems on user productivity. Theoretical grounded on a research framework, 2000 web-survey was sent out to European Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) from Denmark, Portugal, Spain and Sweden to accesses user productivity amongst the four top commercial-packaged ERP (Microsoft, SAP, ORACLE and SAGE).We measured six user productivity factors: system Compatibility, system Complexity, transactional Efficiency, embedded Best-practices, online Training and employee Empowerment. This research found that overall executives on average rated user experience with Microsoft Dynamics NAV more favorably. Furthermore, while system compatibility, online training and embedded best-practices achieve higher scores amongst Dynamics NAV, employee empowerment scores higher for SAP All-in-One and transactional efficiency attain high score for ORACLE JDE. Moreover SAGE X3 was scored as having the highest system complexity. This study is far more important for the questions it raises about how firms should be assessing the commercial-packaged ERP contribution makes to their business performance through users rather study the ERP users.