ERP in Indian SME’s: A post implementation study of the underlying critical success factors

Abstract

Over the past year, the global economic crisis has put the spotlight on many business organisations of any size.With India not being spared of the impact, large establishments have attempted to tackle this crisis in their own ways. Amid all this, SMEs are increasingly being brought into focus on account of their huge growth potential.
   The SME sector in India, which contributes almost half of India’s GDP and is home to a slew of business opportunities. SMEs can carve out value-adding niches for themselves and play an important role at a time when global corporations revisit their established supply and sourcing patterns as a response to the changed business climate.
In the need to remain competitive, they are looking at supply chain areas and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)  solutions seemed to have emerged as a ready made solutions to many SME’s.Therefore, it's of particular interest to analyse the operating implementations, in order to identify the success cases, the nature and measure of the benefits obtained and the context and project-related factors which can influence the chances of a positive outcome.The research presented here was specifically targeted to the SMEs which already completed the process of adopting an ERP system to bring out the underlying factors which can prove decisive for success and to propose a framework that seem to guide This study is based on feedback that has been obtained from 150+ responded who were from various forms of industries,which are essentially SME in nature.

Keywords: ERP, SME, vendor selection, communication, support, cost