Factors affecting the performance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the post-implementation stage

Abstract

Despite the widespread adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, many companies struggle to achieve the expected benefits from ERP. It has been especially observed that many companies fail to gain significant benefits from ERP in the post-implementation stage, regardless of their initial implementation success. This paper focuses on this post-implementation stage and empirically studies the factors that influence the performance of ERP in this stage. Through the review of related literature and a pilot study of Korean firms, the following six were identified as the influential factors: top management support, competency of an internal ERP team, user training, inter-department collaboration and communication, continuous process improvement and continuous systems integration/extension. The factors were used to build a comprehensive model that aims to explain how to successfully use ERP in the post-implementation stage. The model was tested with the data collected by questionnaires given to Korean companies using the partial least-square method. The results show that continuous improvement efforts and on-going organisational support have positive influence on the performance of ERP in the post-implementation stage.