یک نوآوری _ مشاهده نفوذ پیاده سازی سیستم های برنامه ریزی منابع سازمانی (ERP) و توسعه یک مدل تحقیق

Firms around the world have been implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems since the 1990s to have an uniform information system in their respective organizations and to reengineer their business processes. Through a case type analysis conducted in six manufacturing firms that have one of the widely used ERP systems, various contextual factors that influenced these firms to implement this technology were understood using the six-stage model proposed by Kwon and Zmud. Three types of ERP systems, viz. SAP, Baan and Oracle ERP were studied in this research. Implementation of ERP systems was found to follow the stage model. The findings from the process model were used to develop the items for the causal model and in identifying appropriate constructs to group those items. In order to substantiate that the constructs developed to measure the causal model were congruent with the findings based on qualitative analysis, i.e. that the instrument appropriately reflects the understanding of the case interview; ‘triangulation’ technique was used. The findings from the qualitative study and the results from the quantitative study were found to be equivalent, thus, ensuring a fair assessment of the validity and reliability of the instrument developed to test the causal model. The quantitative measures done only at these six firms are not statistically significant but the samples were used as a part of the triangulation method to collect data from multiple sources, to verify the respondents’ understanding of the scales and as an initial measure to see if my understanding from the qualitative studies were accurately reflected by the instrument. This instrument will be pilot tested first and administered to a large sample of firms.

When met with high levels of competition and pressure from the industry, most organizations invariably turn to the information systems department to help them attain advantages in the market by performing better internally through saving resources and through becoming adept in responding to these challenges from the environment. Many manufacturing and other organizations around the world have been able to achieve high levels of performance during the recent turbulent decades because of the application and usage of various IT tools that automated many of their routine organizational activities. Implementation and wide usage of IT tools have helped organizations to function in an organized fashion, thus, alleviating many redundancies that were ubiquitous across the entire organization. Venkatraman [57] recently mentioned that “We are at an interesting turning point in our business history: the industrial age is giving way to the information age and the digital infrastructure is fast replacing the physical infrastructure”. Similar to how industrial machinery and tools were used at the transition from Agrarian to Industrial Economy, currently we are at a stage where information technology tools available and the systems developed using those tools are at infant or premature stages of development and usage with more room for research, development and usage. If we take into account the number of users and how these users utilize these tools, this statement becomes more valid. The work force is slowly being transformed from ‘manual and routine task performing workers’ to knowledge workers because of the rapid use of IT that involves information processing, dissemination and data gathering rather than physical exertion as explained by Zuboff [59]. Information technology application and usage are associated with many inherent drawbacks that were opaque to many of the organizational decision-makers for many years. The changes in the global economy and the intense competition during the early 1990s resulted in a ‘rude awakening’ to many industrial organizations to chart new strategies to be successful if not at least to survive even in local markets. Information technology based tools were seen as one of the significant enablers of success, and organizations went on an IT investment binge in the hope that implementation of IT tools would automatically put them in a comfortable position where all of an organization’s activities were expected to be automated resulting in an ‘efficient’ organization. But they were in for a surprise. Of the US$ 275 billion spent by US firms in 1996 in software applications, 53% of the projects failed [23], and these failures were not because the software were coded incorrectly, rather the companies failed to understand the real organizational needs and systems required to solve their problems to improve performance. After all there was no shortage in the brainpower required to code programs and definitely it was not a laggard to stop US firms from designing an appropriate system. Based on empirical research, Quinn and Baily [45] found that the investments made in IT did not result in any improvements in industrial productivity. The reason for the inability of the firms to realize competitive gains even after spending billions of dollars is that proper usage of IT necessitates changes in the design and structure of an organization as mentioned by Brynjolfsson and Hitt [9] in their paper about ‘productivity paradox’. Brynjolfsson and Mendelson [10] found that organizations might not be able to realize full benefits of a technology unless they make the necessary changes in organizational structure, strategies and processes. Many renowned scholars in MIS including Grover, Teng, Segars, Fiedler, Henderson, Venkatraman, Scott-Morton, Lucas and Baroudi have called for changes in business processes, organizational structures and such management related issues in order to take full advantage of the implemented information technologies [25], [28], [50] and [38]. On the technical side of IT, one of the primary reasons for the inability of many firms to realize the full potential offered by IT is the incompatibility among the various computer hardware and software systems as was found during the case studies and as reported by Ives and Jarvenpaa [29], Stevens [55] and others. Individual functions and divisions started implementing various computer hardware and software systems in their respective functions and divisions during the last decade, which eventually resulted in organizations characterized by a myriad of different systems that could not communicate with one another. Individual functions and divisions were able to realize better performance and efficiency but at an organizational level they were impeded from performing better through using all of the available information because of the systems’ incompatibility. As organizations grew by mergers and acquisitions and as firms transcended beyond their national boundaries, the disparity among their computer hardware and software systems kept increasing. As mentioned by Ives and Jarvenpaa [29] such incompatibility among the various computer hardware and software systems in a global context only encumbered their performance. Discrete automation of business processes that would not result in smooth, continuous and coherent information flows in the entire value chain only impaired an organization’s ability to grow and excel. Since the current information-age business environment bases its competitive requirements on knowledge and information, organizations are forced to work together, rather than in independent functional silos, making available various dispersed information that were available but left untapped due to lack of technical adeptness. Many IT professionals are of the opinion that only a fraction of the available information is used in organizational decision-making processes with the other remaining latent [23]. Because of such incompatibility, information is exchanged only at the local units rather that at a global level. Such automation of only individual functions and divisions that resulted in ‘islands of automation’ is unlikely to have significant impact on the productivity of an organization [25]. Hence, an information technology tool that could help organizations alleviate incompatibility issues to make disparate computer hardware and software systems communicate with one another and at the same time help organizations shift from a traditional functional mode to a business process mode and optimize the resultant business processes to take full advantage of the technology is likely to help organizations enhance their performance. Davenport [18] in his paper on new industrial engineering explained that information technology and business process redesign are two vital tools which by “working together have the potential to create a new type of industrial engineering”. The ERP systems do just that, i.e. besides being an IT innovation, it is also a business process reengineering (BPR) mechanism and, hence, it enables organizations to practice new forms of industrial engineering, a shift away from the traditional forms where IT functioned independent of the business objectives [57]. It should be of no surprise that the sales of the ERP systems was expected to be around US$ 20 billion by the year 2000 and the eventual market size is projected to be around US$ 1 trillion by the year 2010 [6]. To overcome the problems associated with incompatibility, during recent years many organizations in the US and other countries have been implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and the demand for the implementation of these systems is growing rapidly. Through implementation of ERP, these firms are able to achieve an “end-to-end” connectivity, thus, bringing various diverse functions and divisions together. Multinational firms are able to integrate their geographically dispersed subsidiaries with headquarters resulting in a single uniform and coordinated information system and are, thus, able to coordinate and monitor their performance in real time. Many of the inherent drawbacks associated with the materials requirement planning (MRP) and manufacturing resources planning (MRP II) systems have been overcome through implementation of ERP systems, since ERP systems integrate manufacturing function with most or all of the functions in an organization [35]. MRP II systems were used mostly at individual manufacturing facilities or manufacturing facilities in isolation of one another and were not so successful when an organization had multiple and dispersed production facilities. Such problems became more pronounced when organizations grew through mergers and acquisitions, which resulted in higher degree of disparate systems. Through implementing ERP systems, organizations have overcome many of the problems associated with using disparate information systems. From the shop floor activities to performance monitoring in the headquarters, a flawless integration has been achieved through ERP implementation, thus, making the various computer hardware and software platforms compatible to one another. Organizations that implemented ERP systems have made improvements in cross-functional coordination and have improved business performance at various levels. No other IT innovated thus far has had such a profound effect across an entire organization, even at the global level, as did ERP systems, as learned during case interviews. Since ERP is an IT integration tool (and a BPR mechanism) that connects all the databases, activities related to a certain business process occur simultaneously in various functions unlike in sequential manner where information about tasks associated with a business process were ‘passed on’ from one department to another [53]. Since such activities occur simultaneously much of the related paper work is alleviated and time taken to complete a certain task through a certain business process is greatly reduced as observed at the Owens Corning Company. Since there were only a few research works about ERP implementation reported in the literature when this research was initiated, the need to conduct an empirical study in this area became rather obvious. A research work that would explain ERP implementation with a theoretical model is likely to benefit both academics and industry professionals, since such research is likely to shed more light on this recent IT innovation. Any technology implementation is best understood by analyzing and understanding the various contextual factors both from within and from the external environment that resulted in implementation of the technology, the various issues involved during and after implementation and the resulting performance [33] and [44]. To clearly understand the factors of influence, issues, barriers, facilitators and performance, the stage model was found to be a useful tool, because this model frames an implementation as going through certain stages before that technology becomes widely used in an organization. Various issues such as facilitators and barriers to implementation and usage are observed in each of the stages. The reasons for certain firms to implement and widely use a technology compared to some other firms that may have difficulties could be identified using such approach. Justification and details for using the stage model is given in Section 3. With the background set about the changes in the business environment, given the details of ERP systems and the justification to use the stage model to study ERP implementation, this research aims to: 1. Explain the emerging role of ERP in organizations; 2. Explain the various contextual factors associated with the innovation and diffusion of various types of ERP systems using the stage (process) model proposed by Kwon and Zmud [33] and the resulting enhanced performance and; 3. Develop a research (causal) model using the case study findings and based on literature about IT implementation. As a first step to form a robust model, an exploratory research was conducted in six manufacturing firms. This research paper is part of an ongoing research project that aims to explore the business processes both internal and external to an organization due to implementation and usage of advanced IT. ERP implementation research is to understand business processes that are internal to an organization and future research about Internet based processes is to study about business processes that involve elements that are external to an organization. The uniqueness of this research paper is that it combines a process model and causal model, utilizes innovation–diffusion based stage theory to frame implementation of ERP systems and uses triangulation technique to verify the congruence between qualitative findings and the quantitative measures. There are hardly any papers in the IS area that have used Triangulation technique advocated by Kaplan and Duchon [30] in their qualitative analyses.

Kaplan and Duchon [30] based on the research of Bredo and Feinberg [8] and Van Maanen [56] men- tioned that ‘‘ in qualitative studies, researchers develop categories and meanings from data through an itera-tive process that starts by developing an initial under- standing of the perspectives of those being studied and that particular understanding is then tested and mod- i fi ed through cycles of additional data collection and analysis until coherent interpretation is reached ’’ . This was realized in our case studies. During the fi rst case study at Owens Corning there was hardly an understanding of the ERP systems, its technology and usage in organizations and the performance enhance- ment upon implementation. After many interviews with this company a clear picture was obtained, and the fi ndings were used to develop interview questions and an instrument for triangulation for other inter- views. During the course of the fi eld studies in various companies, the understanding of these systems improved and a coherent interpretation of the factors of in fl uence, issues and performance were realized after data collection in many sample fi rms. It may not have been possible to obtain a clearer picture to develop theoretical models based on exploratory ana- lysis of just a few fi rms, and on the other hand, it would be totally wrong to develop and test models about a new area like ERP without doing case studies fi rst. From the results of the research reported in Table 3, it is obvious that all of these companies, which differ widely in many of the organizational characteristics, bene fi ted more than they anticipated through imple- menting these ERP systems and that without such an integrated system in place they could not gain com- petitive advantages in the current and coming years. Besides automating the various business processes, the ERP systems implementation has resulted in new ways of thinking about the organizational activities. Various problems faced by the organizations due to the incompatibility among the computer hardware and software systems were found to be overcome due to the implementation of ERP systems. The current business environment necessitates that an organization work together as a whole and also integrate to their organization the external elements such as the custo- mers and suppliers in order to achieve competitive superiority. The information technology integration through implementation of ERP enabled them to achieve these objectives fairly easily by making avail- able information needed for decision-making in real time. Based on the case analysis conducted in these six fi rms that have implemented ERP systems, this study explained the factors of in fl uence for ERP implementation, the process of ERP implementation, usage of the systems in the organization and the enhanced performance of the organization through implemen- tation of ERP systems. The ERP implementation process was found to go through stages as men- tioned by Kwon and Zmud, and this stage model was found to be useful in understanding the various issues associated with the implementation of ERP systems. All of the constructs were operationalized based on the fi eld interviews and IT implementation literature. The case fi ndings and the results of the preliminary survey were highly congruent indicating that the instrument developed is good to measure the factors of in fl uence, issues and performance. The barriers and facilitators were not measured in this preliminary survey but will be during the pilot test. Since ERP is a recent IT innovation, the research and reported literature are still in the initial stages. This paper makes a contribution to the literature by providing an empirical fi nding about the various ERP systems and their role in enhancing perfor- mance in an organization. Toward developing a model and an instrument to understand and quan- tify the ERP implementation process, the fi rst two steps recommended by Churchill [13] have been achieved through this research. Future research will complete the other six steps, and a sound and robust model about implementation and perfor- mance of ERP systems will be presented in the near future