What Are the Success Factors for Erp Implementations? Litterature Review

Razakaboana Jordi

IS1 ENTERPRISE COMPUTING AND ERP SYSTEMS — HT2016

LITERATURE REVIEW

What are the success factors for ERP implementations?

INTRODUCTION

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system have known a real success

nearby a lot of company of every size and which are in several sector of activities.

The ERP system is the link between several modules and a database that allow a

good performance of a company. The implementation of ERP system in the

company were motivated by the replacement of the priority functional system, the

simplification and standardisation of the system, improvement of the interaction and

communication with the providers, customers and all the partner of the company. To

get implemented into an organisation, the ERP system need to follow several rules

and the team who implement it need to follow a lot of recommendations. We are

going to see what are the critical success factors to succeed the implementation of

an ERP system on a company according to several researches.

According to several studies, we can found a lot of different success factor to

implement ERP system into a company. Those different factors are called CSFs in

most of the studies for Criterial Success Factors. We frequently found some top

CSFs factors which are “well communicated top management commitment”, a team

with the “best people” on it, the participation of every department, goal and objective

as clear as possible, a good management of the project, reasonable expectation at

the end of the project, support from the vendor and so on? Furthermore, a lot of

researches also mentioned the need of an effective communication, a good

organisation between the enterprise and the software company which means that

they need to cooperate as much as possible. Training and educating the user is also

important. The company also need a rapid and iterative prototyping to build

knowledge and the initial strategy shouldn’t be modified. Finally, a tight control on

modification that are proposed, a large experience of the consulting support and top

management involvement are also important. That’s a non-exhaustive list of the

CSFs needed to focus on when an ERP is implemented in a company but they are

nonetheless important. In the following table from Ahmad A. Rabaa’i on his paper

Identifying Critical Success Factors of ERP Systems at the Higher Education Sector

we can see that the top management commitment and support is cited a lot of time

in the different literature that he studied in equality with change management.

In the following we can find the CSFs identified commonly by the different searchers.

As it is mentioned in Buckhout (1999), in Bingi (1999), Rosario (2000) and

Wee (2000) the teamwork and the composition of the team is really important during

the lifecycle of the ERP. Also, the ERP team really have to be composed by the best

qualified people of the organisation. Furthermore the team need to be cross

functional and that is a really important point. As it is written by Sumner (1999) the

team working on the ERP implementation need to be composed by internal

employee of the company mixed with some consultant to allow the employee of the

company to get the competences for design and implementation of the ERP system.

Furthermore in Dumitru Valentin and Florescu Vasile research they are adding that

training the team to assure the competences and the capacity of the person to use

efficiently the ERP system is really important. They are starting with the principle that

it is really primordial to use the best using of the ERP. Furthermore they are saying

that implication of the users on the implementation of the ERP is one of the most

important success factor of the implementation of the ERP in that change

management and it is also important that the CEO is implicated on that

implementation. That join what Sumner said about the coworking of the employee

and the consultant. Wee (2000) is also saying that the team need to be as often as

possible located together to facilitate the co-working on what he add that the

partnership should schedule regular meetings to achieve similar goals. Dumitru

Valentin and Florescu Vasile are adding that the ERP implementation have to be the

project of the whole company to be a success.

After the team composition, the second criteria that we are going to develop is

about business plan. Buckhout (1999) is saying that a clear business plan and a

clear vision of the direction that the project should have is needed during all the ERP

life cycle. Holland (1999) is saying also that the business model should be clear and

explain well how the organization have