Challenges and Success Factors of ERP Systems in Australian SMEs

Abstract

Today, great potential is envisaged for ERP systems in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and software vendors have been repackaging their ERP systems for SMEs with a recent focus on cloud-based systems. While cloud ERP offers the best solution for SMEs without the overheads of the huge investment and management costs that are associated with traditional ERP systems, the SME sector faces many challenges in their adoption. Traditional ERP studies have predominantly focused on large organizations, and gaps in the literature indicate that both vendor and consumer perspectives require more understanding with new technology offerings for SMEs. This paper describes some of the common challenges, such as cost effectiveness, alignment between software and business processes, customized governance and training, which form the major SME constraints for ERP system adoption. Due to the dynamic nature of SME businesses, best practice guidelines for an SME's ERP implementation could be arrived at through closer investigation of its business requirements in order to avoid misfits. This forms the main objective of the study. We identify key success factors of ERP implementation in an Australian SME as a case study. These target success factors are then compared to the actual outcomes achieved. Factors such as business process alignment with the ERP system, meeting customer and stakeholder needs and reducing recurring and maintenance costs were key to the success of ERP implementation for the Australian SME. In particular, the IT and business strategy alignment with a customer focus and flexible reporting features of ERP systems has resulted in business agility.

Implementation and Unification of the ERP System in a Global Company as a Strategic Decision for Sustainable Entrepreneurship

“…Once a company has a unified ERP system, its total administrative operation-financial, warehousing, logistics and commercial-becomes transparent in nature and provides a large number of advantages. This company transparency and possible acquisition activities with integration of the purchased companies, or the sale of a part of the company (e.g., production lines or companies in a specific geographical region), or the sale of the whole company, are important from a managerial perspective and from the investors perspective [24]. Therefore, a unified ERP system, despite the implementation costs, substantially increases a company's value because of transparency and reduced operational threats [25].…”

Gamification of Enterprise Systems

“…Enterprise systems are not only salient in large organizations, but are also adopted and used in small and medium-sized enterprises and government organizations [20,21]. The key literature on enterprise systems has focused on implementation [7,18,[22][23][24][25][26][27], upgrades [5,23,28,29], acceptance [8,[30][31][32], benefits [33,34], usefulness [35], vendor relationships [26,27,36], and assimilation [37][38][39].…”

Journey of ERP from Manufacturing to Education Industry

“…The assimilation of open source system brings a huge performance of ERP system. Venkatraman & Fahd (2016) say, the main adoption problem in the SME is the misfit in implementation process due to non-alignment between vendors and business strategy. SMEs practice open source system which is available at nominal prices, they make implementation simpler and have sufficient features which suffice the SME requirement.…”