Does the organizational culture act as a moderator in Indian enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects? An empirical study

There is significant evidence of increasing global implementation failures in enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects; and, for this reason, critical success factors (CSF) on implementation success (IS) are of notable concern to manufacturing organizations. This paper aims to focus on these factors and the role they played toward implementation success of ERP projects in India. Furthermore, this paper will also seek to explore whether the implementation success is moderated (i.e. influenced) by the organizational culture. This will help other manufacturing organizations take appropriate decisions about the ERP implementation.

In the proposed model, the authors propose organizational culture as the moderator toward the implementation success of ERP projects in India. A survey methodology is used for the study, and a structured questionnaire was developed to get the information.

Through this study, it has been found that the organizational culture acts as a moderator and moderates the relationship between CSF and implementation success of the ERP projects in India.

This study offers both academicians and practitioners a model to research, assess, and identify the appropriate CSF such as Setting up ERP business goals and objectives (SEB), Cross-Functional Teams (CFT), Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Projects Tracking (PTG), and Data Analysis and Conversion (DAG) on IS of ERP projects in India and moderated by the organizational culture. The research is targeted on manufacturing organizations in India, and hence it has limitations in terms of scope. However, the results are quite encouraging with very good response (n=223) from the manufacturing organizations. Other manufacturing organizations planning to implement ERP soon will be highly benefited from the results of this study.

Unfortunately, few research studies define the issues related to the moderator namely the organizational culture. This paper demonstrates how this moderator played an important role in ERP implementation. The findings will encourage Indian manufacturing organizations to implement ERP when facing challenges of the competitive market for their competitive advantage. For India, this research could be among the first to its nature.