Abstract:
The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one of the paradoxes for businesses in the late twentieth and twenty first centuries. ERP systems are prized by businesses because the benefits of an ERP system are so valuable and strategically crucial for organisations. Conversely, it is rejected by businesses as ERP implementation is costly, time-consuming, and risky. ERP implementation can be a business catastrophe when the system implementation fails. Yet, despite nearly 50 years of ERP development and cumulative knowledge about the system and its implementation, the failure rate for ERP implementation remains high, ranging from 50 to 90 percent.
Preliminary field investigation with five senior, director-level consultants in the IT and Consulting industry helped to identify a soft-side people-oriented phenomenon causing significant issues in many ERP implementation projects. This motivated the current research study in exploring the role of the soft side, people-oriented issues in ERP system implementation projects.
There is a paucity of academic and industry literature that examines the soft, people-oriented issues in ERP implementation from a standalone and holistic perspective at a conceptual level. Initially, the phenomenon under investigation was referred to as the soft-side people-oriented factor (SPF) in ERP implementation. However, as the research progressed, this SPF phenomenon evolved into the Ren Wen Factor (RWF) in ERP implementation.
The aims of this research were to first establish that the SPF was a problematic issue in ERP implementation projects; second, the research aimed to investigate whether the RWF is a critical factor for ERP implementation outcomes; and third, to define and describe the RWF in the context of ERP implementation with a particular focus on how to manage it as an important and substantive factor in its own right, distinct from other relevant factors affecting ERP systems.
A qualitative exploratory study was conducted consisting of thirty-five in-depth interviews with a variety of ERP implementation experts. The interviewees were twenty-five senior consultants from the vendor side and ten directors of IT departments of ten companies from the client-side. Rich insights and experiences of many ERP implementations across multiple industries and countries, and extensive views and opinions on the RWF were gleaned from the interviews. Under the grounded theory methodology, a thematic coding was used, and the concept of the RWF was successfully established. An initial version of the conceptual RWF model was created and refined from the findings of the interviews. Subsequently, the RWF concepts established and the RWF model was validated through a series of validation interviews with ten industry experts and four academic experts. The feedback from these validation interviews was used to further refine the RWF concepts and model. Associating the RWF concepts and the validated RWF model presents an unprecedented way for best identifying, capturing, handling, and managing the RWF in ERP implementation projects.
The research findings, including the RWF concepts and model, represent a novel perspective and provide a means for systematically examining the soft-side people-oriented related problems and issues in ERP implementation. The research findings also provide a basis for conducting future research into the effects of the RWF and associated issues in ERP implementation. From practical and academic perspectives, the contributions of this research study are novel, and its importance is bound to induce active research on the topic.