Investigating the Effectiveness of Traditional Support Structures & Self-organizing Entities within the ERP Shakedown Phase

Abstract

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can offer plentiful benefits for organization, yet the endeavour may be in vain if the project is not handled carefully. While the majority of ERP research focus on the effect of users’ characteristics and skills on implementation success; however, this literature review article focuses on how the employees are affected by the ERP system after it has been taken into production by the organization. This phase in the ERP lifecycle is known as the shakedown phase and is seldom addressed in literature. Through a review of the existing literature, this research also explores how organizations can better support their employees in learning and adapting to the new system. Our findings suggest that job satisfaction, technostress, and job stress can be highly affected by the up-and-running ERP system during the shakedown phase. In addition, this research recommends that self-organizing entities, like knowledge management and advice networks, could provide better information quality, at the right time, and in the correct context to employees rather than the traditional support structures (TSS), which in turn could serve as moderators to decrease the negative effects and enhance the prospect of user adoption of the ERP system inside organizations.