Critical success factors in enterprise resource planning implementation in industrial organizations : case study (Esfahan steel company)

Abstract

In order to survive in a rapidly changing business environment, organizations must improve their own business practices and procedures. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be considered as the most important development in the corporate use of information technology and are beginning to be the backbone of organizations. The difficulties and high failure rate in implementing ERP systems have been widely cited in the literature. Factors affecting ERP implementation are complex and abundant and numerous authors have identified a variety of factors that can be considered to be critical to the success of an ERP implementation. In this research, the critical factors that affect ERP systems implementation success in Esfahan Steel Company (ESCO) in Iran have been identified and the importance of these factors has been investigated. Through a comprehensive review of the literature, 8 factors were found to be critical to ERP implementation success. A conceptual framework that determines critical factors which influence the ERP implementation will be developed. The importance of these factors was investigated within the qualitative method with conducts 18 asynchronous online interviews with managers and non-managers has been done to obtain a general understanding of what the critical success factors (CSF) of implementing ERP. “Top management support” and “User Education and Training” have been shown to be the extremely important factors for ERP implementation and in addition, "Business Process Reengineering" was found to moderate the relationship between CSFs and ERP's success in ESCO. This study will extend in the research field of successful implementation ERP to have more knowledge in term of implementation ERP.