استفاده کارآمد از اطلاعات سازمانی برای مزیت استراتژیک: تحلیل پوششی داده ها

A majority of manufacturers make use of some form of enterprise systems (ES), yet on average, the financial impact of ES adoption is essentially neutral. We propose that in an ES environment of easy information access, competitive success depends, in part, on the policies regulating enterprise information use. To explore this proposition, we examine the efficient use of different types of enterprise information in the realization of strategic performance. Efficient firms will devote fewer resources to information use to achieve the same strategic performance as less efficient firms. We employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) using data collected from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system adopters at two different points in time in order to calculate a measure of efficient information use. This information efficiency metric is validated as a strong predictor of Compustat profitability. Additional analyses suggest that the most efficient users of information tend to emphasize information related to operational excellence. Regardless of information emphasis, however, efficient manufacturers – in contrast to their less efficient counterparts – were more likely to exhibit a better match between the most emphasized type of information and the corresponding dimension of strategic performance.

Today's managers rely more than ever before on management information systems to provide them with the business data needed to make critical decisions. The prevalence of enterprise systems – MetaGroup (2004) estimate that 400 of the Fortune 500 firms have adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems – has ensured that many managers have access to up-to-the-minute data on all aspects of their enterprises. Yet the long-term financial performance of the average firm with an enterprise system is not greatly different from that of firms without such technological support (Hendricks et al., 2007). We define an enterprise system as an integrated planning and resource management system that coordinates information across all enterprise functions. Thus, an enterprise system encompasses more than core ERP functionality. By 2002, some form of integrated supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and product lifecycle management (PLM) functionality was common among enterprise system users either through in-house development or software upgrades from major ERP vendors such as SAP (Bendoly and Jacobs, 2005).

Using data collected from ERP users at two points in time, we empirically explore the relationship between the efficient use of enterprise information in the realization of strategic performance and Compustat profitability. In doing so, we first develop measures of enterprise information use and strategic performance in the context of Treacy and Wiersema's (1993) operational excellence, customer intimacy, and product leadership value disciplines. Utilizing DEA, we then construct an efficiency metric comprised of these measures. Our DEA-derived efficiency metric is a strong predictor of Compustat profitability, which suggests a clear link between the information-use policies defined by the manufacturers positioned on the performance frontier and the bottom line. To gain a deeper understanding of the drivers of efficient information use and, ultimately, profitability, we go on to decompose our efficiency metric. We find that manufacturers on the performance frontier show no significant differences in strength along the strategic performance variables. However, efficient manufacturers, on average, do tend to place significantly more emphasis on operational excellence information than on customer intimacy or product leadership information. Efficient manufacturers are also significantly more likely to demonstrate superior strategic performance that corresponds to the most emphasized type of enterprise information. These findings have important implications for both theory and practice.