A discussion of barriers to successful exploitation of ERP systems in China

The research presented in this paper aims at identifying, assessing and discussing potential social, cultural, organisational and system barriers to successful exploitation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE). In spite of the urgent need for research in this area, there is a scarcity of studies focusing on ERP post-implementation, in contrast with an over abundance of studies focusing on implementation and project management aspects. The need for the research thus emerged from the growing awareness in the field that there is a lack of studies addressing the organisational exploitation of ERPs after the implementation stage.

The study adopted a deductive research design based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey. This survey was preceded by a Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) analysis and a set of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT) analyses that enabled the researchers to narrow the scope of the study and identify an appropriate industry sector and region, namely the Electronic and Telecommunication Manufacturing Sector in the Guangdong province. The questionnaire design was based on a theoretical ontology of barriers drawn from a systematic literature review process. The questionnaire was sent to the operational managers and the information technology (IT) managers of 118 SOEs in China, from which 42 valid and usable responses were received and analysed.

The findings identified that ICT system-related barriers are currently perceived by respondents as more crucial to ERP post-implementation. In contrast, due to China’s rapid economic development, continuous reforms and fluid nature of organisational environments, cultural and organisational ERP barriers were assigned a lower priority by the SOEs studied. As a result of this analysis, this paper presents and discusses 25 ERP exploitation barriers, from which 9 barriers were considered critical. The study also explored and identified 15 correlations between the barriers identified.