ERP Decisions: The Role of Organizational Culture and SCM Practices

ERP has been well proved to be critical to improve company competitiveness, but not all ERP projects come out with a success. We believe that ERP decision is the first step to make ERP succeed, which is not as simple as comparing the prices of various systems (Piturro, 1999). Building on the knowledge of existing literature about organizational culture and IT behaviors, we examined the role of organizational culture and supply chain management (SCM) practices in an organization’s decision upon ERP decision. Based on the data we collected from 80 companies, we found that organizational culture and SCM practices significantly affect ERP decision; we also propose the mediating role of SCM practices between organizational culture and ERP decision

Organizational Culture, Supply Chain Management Practices and Organization’s Decision upon ERP Systems

In recent years, more and more Chinese organizations have tried to adopt enterprise resources planning (ERP) systems to improve their supply chain management (SCM) practices and efficiencies and subsequently to increase their competiveness in the marketplace. However, compared with their Western counterparts, the failure rate of ERP implementation for the Chinese organizations is much higher. Many of them find it very difficult to select an ERP system that fits their management practices. We believe that cultural differences could be the important reason contributing to the phenomenon that existing Western-based ERP systems cannot be directly adopted in Chinese companies. In this study, we propose a theoretical model that stipulates how organizational culture affects ERP decisions through influencing supply chain management practices. The object of this study is not only to provide insights for Western ERP vendors to modify/localize their existing systems to better fit local Chinese practices; but also to provide guidance for Chinese companies to select ERP systems or to develop their own systems. Empirical data will be collected to validate the proposed model. In order to develop measurement constructs for the survey instrument, company visits and interviews are conducted. In this paper, we shall reveal the initial findings from the interviews and discuss the steps forwar

Guest Editorial

It is our pleasure to present this special issue of CIT. Journal of Computing and Information Technology. In this issue (Volume 22, Issue LISS 2013), we selected eight papers which have gone through several rounds of review and revision, and represent a cross-section of research in information technology areas that touch upon both technical and managerial issues. The preliminary versions of these papers were presented at the Third International Conference on Logistics, Informatics and Service Science (LISS 2013), which was jointly hosted by Beijing Jiaotong University, China and the University of Reading, August 23–26, 2013 at Reading, UK.</p

Study on Risks of Medical Industry Ecommerce Based on Supply Chain Management

From the point of view of cost-reduction and benefit-improvement, this paper puts up with a new ECommerce mode for the medical industry—E-Commerce based on supply chain management (SCM). At the same time, this paper qualitatively analyzes the risks of the mode, including risk of management, risk of technology, risk of human resource and risk of the mode itself. At last, the paper puts forward a set of risk management models for this ECommerce mode according to the basic principles pf project management

Guest Editorial

It is our pleasure to present this special issue of CIT. Journal of Computing and Information Technology. In this issue (Volume 22, Issue LISS 2013), we selected eight papers which have gone through several rounds of review and revision, and represent a cross-section of research in information technology areas that touch upon both technical and managerial issues. The preliminary versions of these papers were presented at the Third International Conference on Logistics, Informatics and Service Science (LISS 2013), which was jointly hosted by Beijing Jiaotong University, China and the University of Reading, August 23–26, 2013 at Reading, UK.</p

Impact of Product Modularity on Mass Customization Capability: An Exploratory Study of Contextual Factors

This study examines how the impact of product modularity on the mass customization capability is moderated by several contextual factors, such as the firms’ information system capacity (ISC), teamwork (TW), multifunctional employees (MFE), and organizational structure (flat or hierarchical) (OSF). Data from 238 firms located in multiple countries across three different industry groups were analyzed to test the moderated regression models and the hypotheses. The results showed that the product modularity strongly impacts the mass customization capability (MCC). Compared to ISC, the social contextual variables, such as TW, MFE, and OSF, have stronger moderating effects on the impact of the product modularity on the mass customization capability. In addition, ISC helps MCC solely for firms with flat organizational structures. Overall, our study suggests that manufacturers who desire to become mass customizers should create flat, nimble organizations with employees who are trained in several different tasks and are adept at teamwork

Information Security Engineering: a Framework for Research and Practices

Information security is not a new topic in academics and industry. However, through a comprehensive literature review, we found that most research in information security focus on technical perspectives including evaluation methods and mathematical approaches for securities, risk mitigation algorithms, with some research focus on economic perspective of information security and even a few talked about social engineering of information security. There is not a unique framework to integrate different types of research in information security. We believe that information security research apply the theories and methodologies in systems engineering to investigate the problems, that is, information security engineering. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework of information security engineering. This framework explicitly illustrates the methodological system, content system, procedures and strategies for information security engineering research and practices.*Corresponding author: Mincong Tang,E-mail [email protected]