Enterprise Systems Benefits Research Articles

Enhancing client citizenship behavior in enterprise system service of China: the role of enterprise system benefits and guanxi

ABSTRACTThe implementation of enterprise systems (ES) is an IT-enabled collaboration between vendors and clients. This collaboration contributes to the economy of developing countries by offering high added value with low resource consumption. Researchers and practitioners in the ES service industry believe that the citizenship behavior of clients is critical to the success of such a collaboration. However, despite this recognition, current knowledge on how to improve the citizenship behavior of clients through the benefits provided by ES remains unclear. The present study uses social exchange theory in proposing a model for examining the effects of ES benefits (i.e. ES task efficiency and ES coordination improvement) on client citizenship behavior in China through guanxi (i.e. renqing and ganqing). The data collected from 112 client firms of a focal ES vendor support most of the hypotheses. ES task efficiency and ES coordination improvement positively affect renqing, which in turn influences client citizenship behavior. ES coordination improvement positively influences ganqing and sequentially client citizenship behavior. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

Enterprise systems and performance of future city logistics

Future cities are driven by the developments in Information and Communication Technology to support the triple bottom line requirements of sustainability. Logistics will play a critical role in future cities due to the increasingly micro-dynamic nature of socio-economics of these cities and globalised production and consumption patterns. Enterprise systems (ES), the founding applications to automate and integrate different business processes, will be the key enablers for providing the necessary support required by the future city logistics. However, the implementation of ES and realisation of proposed benefits within the estimated time frame is challenging due to the huge resource requirements in terms of manpower, budget and time. This study takes the antecedent (critical success factors) approach for the implementation process to establish a success predictive model for the realisation of ES benefits. The partial least square regression has been used to test the model. Moreover, this study explores the impact of ES benefits on the logistics performance indicators to explore the synergies between them. This is fundamentally important because future city logistics will rely heavily on appropriately designed and implemented (enterprise) information systems.

Impact of chief information officer’s strategic knowledge and structural power on enterprise systems success

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of chief information officer’s (CIO’s) strategic knowledge and structural power on enterprise systems (ES) success in the context of systems usage.Design/methodology/approach– Drawing upon knowledge-based view, this study links CIO’s strategic knowledge, structural power, ES assimilation and firm performance in an integral model. Sample data were collected in China and partial least squares technique was used to test the model.Findings– Empirical results suggest that CIO’s strategic information technology (IT) knowledge, strategic business knowledge and structural power have significant influence on ES assimilation. While ES assimilation mediates the association between CIO’s strategic knowledge, CIO’s structural power and firm performance. Another interesting finding in the study is that the imbalance of CIO’s strategic business knowledge and strategic IT knowledge is negatively associated with ES assimilation.Originality/value– This study enriches the extant literatures in IS leadership by showing the significant role of CIO’s knowledge balance and authority in promoting the assimilation of ES within the organization. The empirical findings can provide guidelines for the top executive to select a person who is familiar with both strategic business and IT knowledge to take charge of ES, also, to provide the person with appropriate structural power, in order to achieve the benefits of ES successfully.

Enterprise systems: are we ready for future sustainable cities

Purpose – This paper aims to revisit the adoption reasons of enterprise systems (ES) and supply chain management systems (SCMS) and to explore the new dimensions of sustainability required to be added in the whole process of adoption of these systems. Moreover, it aims to explore the benefits of ES to organizations and to relate these benefits to the ES adoption in future sustainable city settings. Future cities will have micro-industries requiring dynamic interactions and will be dependent on efficient supply chains. The recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) such as cloud computing through its dynamic, on-demand and service-based delivery are making it possible to achieve those goals for supply chains. The ES in general and more specifically SCMS have integrated organizations into one seamless mesh. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a framework for adoption of sustainable ES in a smart city setting. The framework, firstly, is presented at a macro-level, particularly incorporating the relative significance of motivational factors for sustainable ES adoption. Subsequently, The authors study the benefits of ES as perceived by large and small and medium enterprise (SME) organizations using 100 case studies and discuss how these benefits can be realized for smart cities by projecting the ES benefits onto the proposed framework. The benefits are estimated with the Shang and Seddon’s (2002) framework. Findings – The adoption of ES initiated with environmental factors and mediated with business and technical factors will bring benefits in all the dimensions of triple bottom line in addition to the firm’s performance. ES will have pivotal role in future smart city settings and will be able to offer social, environmental and economic sustainability in addition to traditional organizational performance indicators. Originality/value – The proposed framework for ES adoption will bring ES packages (particularly, the required relative significance of adoption reasons) into the perspective of sustainable development. Moreover, the study of its benefits in relation to the proposed sustainable ES adoption framework presented in this paper will help in motivating organizations to incorporate social, economic and environmental sustainability into their core business objectives.

A framework for identifying and understanding enterprise systems benefits

PurposeIdentifying the benefits arising from implementations of enterprise systems and realizing business value remains a significant challenge for both research and industry. This paper aims to consolidate previous work. It presents a framework for investigating enterprise systems benefits and business change, which addresses the identified limitations of previous research and provides a more detailed analysis of benefits and their contextual variation.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on data gathered from 31 real‐world organizations (case studies) of differing size, maturity, and industry sector, the study adopts an iterative content analysis to empirically derive a comprehensive benefits framework.FindingsThe content analysis provides a detailed classification of expectations and benefits, which is described in a four‐level framework. The four levels (areas) are further subdivided into aspects and criteria plus an attributed appraisal value. The resulting scheme for the “three‐level benefit codes” provides a greater level of detail about the nature of expected and realized benefits.Practical implicationsThe high level of detail and the code scheme comprising 60 different codes and the method for deriving the codes allows companies to identify and define benefits as well as to assess the outcome of enterprise systems implementation projects.Originality/valueThe paper empirically develops an applicable benefits framework, which addresses the lack of detail of previous frameworks.

Upstream supply chain benefits from e-markets in the UK higher education sector

Industrial e-markets present supply chain participants with a number of opportunities as well as challenges. Although some studies promulgate the benefits supply chain participants gain from transacting through industrial e-markets in a number of sectors, few empirical studies have examined the benefits arising from such markets in the public sector. Still even fewer studies specifically focus on the benefits suppliers gain from participation in e-markets. This study expounds the business benefits suppliers gain from participating in two e-markets, Lab-Procure and Education eXchange, in the higher education sector. The study used the Shang and Seddon Enterprise Systems Benefits Framework to determine the benefits suppliers gained from e-market participation. The study found benefits pertaining to the operations, managerial and strategic dimensions of the framework.

Resource management activities in healthcare information systems: A process perspective

Healthcare industries have not only been criticized for being slow in adopting IT (Barnes 2001) but also face tremendous challenges in developing and deploying HIS successfully (Teoh and Cai 2009). In view of these challenges, this study aims to articulate the theory and practice from Enterprise Systems (ES) as it is perceived to produce an extensive suite of strategic, managerial, and operational benefits in the healthcare setting. Healthcare institutions have begun to explore the possibilities of exploiting ES as a means to facilitate the delivery of high-quality and integrated patient care. In particular, one of the benefits of ES is that it leads to better resource management in terms of assets and manpower allocation. In our study, empirical data was collected and analyzed based on an in-depth case study of two ES implementations at Alexandra Hospital in Singapore. Our findings contribute to the ES research on how an organization manages its resource portfolio and activity during the implementation of a healthcare information system in a hospital. Theoretically, we adapted and extended Sirmon et al.'s (2007) Dynamic Resource Management Model of Value Creation and integrated it with the Technochange Life Cycle framework proposed by Markus (2004). Finally, this paper adds value by inductively deriving eight key resource management activities and seven key resources that correspond to the phases of the technochange life cycle.

Editorial

Editorial

Assessing and managing the benefits of enterprise systems: the business manager's perspective

Abstract.This paper focuses on the benefits that organizations may achieve from their investment in enterprise systems (ES). It proposes an ES benefit framework for summarizing benefits in the years after ES implementation. Based on an analysis of the features of enterprise systems, on the literature on information technology (IT) value, on data from 233 enterprise systems vendor‐reported stories published on the Web and on interviews with managers of 34 organizations using ES, the framework provides a detailed list of benefits that have reportedly been acquired through ES implementation. This list of benefits is consolidated into five benefits dimensions: operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure and organizational, and illustrated using perceived net benefit flow (PNBF) graphs. In a detailed example, the paper shows how the framework has been applied to the identification of benefits in a longitudinal case study of four organizations.