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Abstract:

Purpose – Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have become imperative for companies in order to be competitive in a turbulent and highly competitive business environment. Unfortunately, the success rate of ERP implementations is very low, which was cited in many researches and a majority of authors have reported up to 90 percent failure rate. Therefore, new empirical studies are more than necessary to validate companies' contributions to the increase of the success rate of ERP implementation, which was the primary reason for this investigation. The main goal of this paper is to stress the impact of business process management (BPM) and some other critical success factors (CSFs) on successful ERP implementations.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper details an empirical investigation combined with a confirmatory approach using structural equation modeling.

Findings – The hypotheses confirm the impact of top management support, change management, and BPM on successful ERP implementation. These factors have a positive impact on successful ERP implementation and should be treated as very important in ERP systems implementation projects. The results also support the importance of top management perception (MP): if they consider BPM as a basis of business change, this contributes to a strong and positive influence on successful ERP implementation.

Research limitations/implications – Other CSFs, also required for successful ERP implementations are not covered in this paper. The sample of companies used in this study is limited only to one country, and the aspect of chief information officers (CIOs) should not be omitted either, because other CIOs might have answered the questionnaire in a different way.

Practical implications – Companies should treat BPM as a basis of business change and therefore increase its usage in order to increase a possibility for a successful ERP implementation. Although the ERP implementation is not the most efficient per se, its effectiveness on business performance can be greater.

Originality/value – Contributions of the paper are important for both practitioners and researchers. The paper will provide a very few specific factors and findings which are useful for companies when planning to implement ERP systems, and should not be omitted. From theoretical standpoints the most CSFs in ERP implementations can be combined, which are dispersed in the literature, and thus facilitate or somehow even stimulate other researchers in further investigations of those factors, which are still not defined enough or investigated.

Keywords:

Business process re-engineering, Critical success factors, Manufacturing resource planning, Modelling, Process management

Article Type:

Research paper

Article URL:

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/14637150910975552

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