Everyone is Different! Exploring the Issues and Problems with ERP Enabled Shared Service Initiatives

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, there is constant pressure for corporate leaders to add value to their organizations. These contemporary organizations are increasingly moving into business models that attempt to reduce duplicate supporting processes and staff by streamlining business processes that are not central to the organization’s operations and concentrating on strategies on strategic or core, business processes. This concept, known as Shared Services, attempts to bundle some of the supporting processes and non-strategic activities into a separate organization, which in turn treats those processes and activities as the core of its own business. Shared Services consolidate and support redundant functions, such as accounts payable and procurement, for disparate business units. By leveraging economies of scale from a common IT infrastructure, such a group is able to market specific services to business units. Many organizations are employing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, for example SAP, to facilitate Shared Service initiatives by aggregating backroom functionality across departments. This research-in-progress paper investigates issues and problems with ERP enabled Shared Services in 19 organizations. The results reveal five main issues that organizations face in implementing a Shared Services initiative

Multi-Stakeholder Assessment of Critical Success Factors: Insights from the World's Fastest SAP R/3 Implementation

Organizations invest substantial resources in Enterprise Systems (ES) expecting positive outcomes for the organization and its functions. Implementing an ES is a lengthy and costly undertaking, with general upheaval for many of the organizations. Many organizations therefore are seriously considering rapid ES-implementations to reduce cost and other related resources. This paper presents findings of a study conducted to understand critical success factors of rapid ES-implementations gathering data from the world’s fastest SAP implementation, completed in a record time of three weeks. Using a two-phased case study design, gathering data from four distinct stakeholders, this study recognized the relevance of critical success factors identified through the literature to the context of rapid ES-implementations. Moreover, the study identified three new critical success factors that are specific to rapid ES-implementations. The study also demonstrated differentiating views of multiple stakeholders on each of the critical success factors

An empirical investigation of the salient characteristics of IS-Success models

This paper investigates four salient characteristics of IS-success models that are largely ignored in prior literature. Using data gathered from 600 responses, this study establishes the importance of (1) completeness of the model dimensions and measures, (2) mutual exclusivity of the model dimensions and measures, (3) model parsimony, and the (4) additivity of the model dimensions to yield an overarching score. These characteristics are rarely established and are seldom reported in academic literature that spans over three decades. Lack of discussion and little consensus on the aforementioned issues has led to incomparable results and a compromised cumulative research tradition. The paper demonstrates the importance of these issues and provides prescriptive guidelines for future research

Testing a Framework for the Quality of Process Models - A Case Study

Process modeling can be regarded as the currently most popular form of conceptual modeling.\ud Research evidence illustrates how process modeling is applied across the different information\ud system life cycle phases for a range of different applications, such as configuration of Enterprise\ud Systems, workflow management, or software development. However, a detailed discussion of\ud critical factors of the quality of process models is still missing. This paper proposes a framework\ud consisting of six quality factors, which is derived from a comprehensive literature review. It then\ud presents in a case study, a utility provider, who had designed various business process models for\ud the selection of an Enterprise System. The paper summarizes potential means of conducting a\ud successful process modeling initiative and evaluates the described modeling approach within the\ud Guidelines of Modeling (GoM) framework. An outlook shows the potential lessons learnt, and\ud concludes with insights to the next phases of this study

Do we put all eggs in one basket? A polynomial regression study of digital technology configuration strategies

Digital technologies like social media, mobile, analytics, cloud computing and internet-of-things seem to provide organizations with a plethora of options to construct and configure their technology portfolios for enhancing firm performance. Due to seemingly low-cost, subscription-based, easy-to-adopt, easy-to-use nature of digital technologies, organizations are tempted to diversify their technology portfolios to thrive in the hyper-competitive dynamic markets. Using data gathered from chief information officers representing 177 organizations, this research investigates the effect of four digital technology portfolio configuration strategies that leads to firm performance

Towards a CRM and SCM Benefits Measurement Model

Organizations invest heavily in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, and their related infrastructure, presumably expecting positive benefits to the organization. Assessing the benefits of such systems is an important aspect of managing such systems. Given the substantial differences between CRM and SCM systems with traditional intra-organizational applications, existing Information Systems benefits measurement models and frameworks are ill-suited to gauge CRM and SCM benefits. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a research that seeks to develop a measurement model to assess benefits of CRM and SCM applications. The a-priori benefits measurement model is developed reviewing the 55 academic studies and 40 practitioner papers. The review of related literature yielded 606 benefits, which were later synthesized into 74 mutually exclusive benefit measures of CRM and SCM applications arranged under five dimensions

The AST View of ES Knowledge Management: Insights from World\u27s Fastest SAP R/3 Implementation

Organizations invest substantial resources in Enterprise Systems (ES) expecting positive outcomes for the organization. Implementing an ES is a lengthy-costly undertaking, with general upheaval for many of the organizations. Many organizations therefore are seriously considering rapid implementations of ES to reduce related resources. A rapid ES implementation requires effective management of knowledge (KM) as the extent of the engagement of external and internal parties (consultants and vendors with the client) is limited. This research paper introduces a theoretical model to assess the impact of KM in a rapid implementation of SAP R/3 that had completed in a record time of three weeks. Using the Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) this paper proposes a theoretical model 1) to identify the KM enablers and KM strategies of an rapid ES implementation that facilitate knowledge creation, retention and transfer and 2) to determine the importance of knowledge transfer modes in a rapid ES implementation

Developing an a-Priori Model of Online Review Process

More and more online feedback is being relied upon to make choices about the purchases and services we use daily. Conversely, companies rely on online reviews to find new customers and understand how people perceive them. Therefore, the online reviewing process and all its entities and processes are salient. Hence, in this research, we analyse online review related trends in research between the years 2000–2021 with an inductive categorization of 181 articles, in over fifty leading academic outlets. Using this categorization, we next investigate trends in the discussion and research on the online reviewer, online review, and review reaction. From these trends, we develop a nomological a-priori net of the online review process. Further, we discuss, some limitations of the current literature, posit research directions for future scholars and address the gaps in the current research on the online review process