ERP ASSIMILATION: AN END-USER APPROACH

One premise of this paper is that ERP implementation is an “organization wide revolution” because a large number of changes happen. Unfortunately, after 20 years of experience, many implementations of ERP systems take longer and cost more than projected or even fail. As many authors stated, one major cause appears to be that organizational issues are neglected or underestimated. In this type of IT project the organizations confront with many problems because they put inadequate stress on the management of change brought about by the technology. We consider that the success of the implementation depends highly on the company’s openness to change. Change is not always welcomed by end-users, so the first step is to ensure that the executive management supports the team’s vision, the vendor selection and the implementation project from beginning to completion. When an ERP software provider is selected, it should display the qualities and be prepared to act as a “change agent”, one who can explain short-term and long-term benefits of the proposed changes, while being sensitive to each end-user’s level of change acceptance. Our study was focused on the end-users behaviour and perception. The paper discusses the ERP adoption based on the IT assimilation theory. The ERP lifecycle is associated with the IT assimilation steps. We propose a distribution of these steps along the lifecycle. Derived from the findings in the reviewed literature we will focus the cultural factors, in particular those related to the end-users (determined as a major impact factor in our previous study: Negovan et al., 2011). Our empirical study is centred on the end-users perspective and it tries to determine if and how their behaviour affects the achievement of the ERP assimilation steps. The paper reasons that organizations that understand the IT assimilation steps correlated to the ERP implementation critical factors are more likely to implement and use ERP successfully.