Risks associated with ERP post-adoption: the case of a large manufacturing firm in China

The study reported in this paper aims to identify, assess and explore ERP post-implementation risks in the context of large Chinese companies. The need for the research emerged from the growing awareness in the filed that there is a lack of studies addressing the organisational exploitation of ERPs after the implementation stage. The research took a large Chinese manufacturing firm as a case study. A theoretical ERP risk ontology, which was adopted from our previous research, was used to frame the study and generate data collection tools. Questionnaire was used to explore ERP risks in the selected case company, from which 42 valid responses were received and analysed. The study identified 37 ERP exploitation risks, of which seven were identified as the most critical to the case company. It concluded that, in contrast with technical risks, organisational and human-related risks are more crucial to potential ERP failures.