Abstract
In this dissertation, the focus will be on the analysis of success factors for implementing the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the State of Qatar.
For this reason, the study will take form of investigation both primary and secondary sources for obtaining industry views and comparing them with already published information related to critical success factors of ERP.
The proposed study will investigate different critical successful factors of ERP and their existence for both private and governmental organizations operating in Qatar.
The methodology proposed in qualitative in nature and will involve survey questionnaire to obtain views and responses from employees of organizations. The outcome will be rather subjective however, efforts will be made to provide a critical evaluation of factors affecting ERP implementation.
Research Question
- What are the inherent relations among CSFs in ERP implementation?
- What is the relation between CSFs and the company’s characteristics?
The CSFs to be evaluated are as follows:
- Support from the top management of organization,
- The flow of controlled and planned activities achieved through the integrated systems,
- The positive response of management and employees to the implementation of new system and the change it brings,
- Training and development of the system’s stake holders,
- The restructuring of the business processes that are brought about by the implementation of the system and the users’ interaction with the system,
- The effectiveness of the software and hardware on which the ERP is implemented.
For the sake of collecting up to date information, a survey will be conducted in Qatar’s organizations, in which the emphasis will be on collecting information about the success of their ERP implementation and other issues related to that organization.
The findings of this study will be required to reflect t he vital role of the success factors in the implementation of the ERP system and its advantages to the respective organizations.
Introduction
ERP has revolutionized the business practices of organizations since 1990. It is evident from the study carried out by Glenn Stewart (2000) that more than 55% Fortune 500 organizations in today’s world has implemented ERP systems to provide a better chance of success to their businesses (Stewart, 2000).
ERP has played such an important role in the success of these organizations that it has become an integral part of their organizational resources. ERP systems provide a window of opportunity to the organizations by helping them to improve their business processes and in reducing their production costs (Nah et al., 2001).
Research Objective
During this study, data from Qatar’s business organizations will be collected to analyze the critical success factors and the inter relations of these critical factors in the implementation of the ERP system.
The focus will also be on finding out how these success factors have some relationship with the organizations’ characteristics and their nature of business. Also, it will also be discussed that how the installation of ERP systems in organizations’ business process helps in improving its ability to respond to the changes.
Literature Review
Joyjeet Banerjee (2007) defined ERP as a system that helps the management to bring together different business activities into one mechanism.
ERP has revolutionized the business processes, where sales, marketing, finance, production, procurement and human resource systems of organizations are presented at once to the decision makers and they can analyze the business situation without wasting time (Banerjee, 2008).
In one study, the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning system in multinational companies in telecom sectors, was discussed in which, the research team found that the implementation had positively affected the operation of these companies by improving their operational strength and effectiveness.
The overall process of implementing ERP systems in these organizations was also defined along with the system’s affects on the performance of each working department within these organizations (Joe et al., 2004).
Eric Chan (2009) discussed the implementation of ERP systems in the construction industry. He stated that the ERP systems have enhanced the knowledge resources of organizations in today’s era and organizations are using this knowledge to achieve a competitive edge over their competitors.
Further, he added that the construction industry has experienced major improvement and success rates after the implementation of different ERP systems on their business practices. ERP has helped organizations to integrate their business process as it improves the organizations’ ability to handle the flow of information from top to bottom (Chan, 2009).
In another study, it was found that the success factors of ERP system implementation across most of the organizations are same which reflects that the success rate is same in developing countries as it is in developed countries.
Although the success rate is high for adopting this system, there are cases in which organizations failed to counter the change that they experienced after adopting the ERP system.
The reason of failure seems to be the lack of support and guidance for adopting these systems and converting the change into a success story or the organizations failed to respond to the time constraints that might have arise due to the adaptation of the system.
This study do find a relationship between the critical success factors of implementing ERP in organizations, with that of country and supply chain members (Ngai et al., 2008).
In his study, Jiang Yingjie (2005) discussed the importance of ERP systems in modern era.
He said that these integrated systems have proved to be playing an anchor role in organizations’ success since its introduction and businesses continue on depending on these systems for their enterprise’s management and administration.
He also discussed the possible ways to successfully launch ERP systems and minimize the chances of failure (Yingjie, 2005).
Methodology
The proposed methodology for this study is one which is qualitative in nature. Qualitative researches depend on concluding descriptive findings and analysis of a research problem. This research methodology has been used now days by majority of the researchers (Dobney, 2011).
An electronic questionnaire will be mailed to the target respondents which will contain questions divided into two categories. They are:
- Question for collecting the data which analyze the success rate of some elements of ERP, such as the time constraints, costs and budgeting for the system and the degree of functionality and effectiveness of the system.
- Questions for identifying what respondents think about the CSF and their importance to the implementation of ERP systems.
The expected number of participants will be between 10 private companies and 5 government organizations. The reason for selecting a mix of such companies is to gather views from a wide spectrum of organizations and to provide a comprehensive overview on the critical success factors of ERP implementation.
Respondents in these organizations will be employees of the company working in different departments who have the knowledge and understanding of ERP and its use for their organizations.
Reason for selecting mail based survey is that, it is less time consuming, researcher will not be required to rewrite the responses collected from respondents into the computer, and the answers can be directly analyzed with the help of specialized software.
Another major reason for choosing this methodology is that travelling to Qatar will increase the costs of this study; therefore, mailing will minimize huge expenses.
The questionnaire design will be descriptive for analyzing detailed responses provided by the respondents. Company’s addresses, to which the questionnaire will be sent, will be fetched out from the yellow pages and business directory of Qatar.
Due to the language barriers, the cover letter and questionnaire will be mailed, both in Arabic and English. Questions regarding the organization, its history, its business activities and respondents’ position in the organization will also be included.
The methodology for collecting responses was designed, keeping in view the previous work done by researchers on this topic.
For example, Jiang Yingjie (2005) used the same methodology for conducting a study on critical success factors in ERP implementation in the European country of Finland. Yingjie mailed the questionnaire to the CFOs of 646 companies and through mail and e-mail.
Secondary sources will also be extensively used for fetching important information and literature related to the topic. These may include published journals, conference proceedings, previous researches and dissertations, books and other sources.
Reflections
Limitations
In this study, the research team could face the difficulty of finding related data on ERP implementation in Qatar. It will be very difficult to find data on ERP in Qatar with the help of which, it would be easier for the researcher to analyze and compare the results obtained from findings.
To overcome this problem, the findings from the proposed study will be compared with those of previously completed studies conducted in other countries. However, closeness of economic setup and conditions will be kept in mind for comparing the findings.
It is recommended not to draw upon conclusions after studying this paper and more research paper regarding this topic should also be studied to analyze the exact critical success factors for the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems to business processes in the State of Qatar.
Despite of the fact that these critical success factors might not be important for adaptation of ERP systems in Qatar, but this study will outline the major problems in implementing the Enterprise Resource Planning systems that must be considered before opting out for this system.
Ethical Issues
Keeping in view, the ethical guidelines and policies of Qatar, the researcher will acquire the approval for conducting survey in the State. Special attention will be paid to protect the privacy of the information provided from the respondents and the researcher will not leak this information to anyone.
As the focus of this study is to perform individual work; therefore, the researcher will not acquire the services of any third party or outsource any part of this study to get completed.
Also, the researcher will try to avoid plagiarism and will take full responsibility if the instructor or the university found any act of stealing information or data from any source.
The researcher will make all possible efforts to provide due credit to the authors of already published information however, due to human error there could be some instances which could appear in the report.
Finally, it will be the right of researcher that the printed version of this study he provides, should not be exposed or leaked in the public beside its academic purpose, without the prior approval of the researcher and his mentor.
Position as a Political Researcher
As this research focuses on the implementation of ERP systems in the State of Qatar, a thorough understanding of the overall environment for businesses in the country will be built by studying material available over the internet and also implications of business tools in planning will be of benefit for assisting the business community in formulating governmental policies.
Conclusion
This study will help us to enhance the knowledge about the critical success factors that have an impact on the adaptation and implementation of ERP systems in Qatar’s organizations and government’s mechanism. It will also provide an overview of the benefits that an effective ERP system might provide to these organizations.
Keeping in view that the success factors of ERP systems’ adaptation and implementation are difficult to interpret and dispersed in different forms across businesses of different natures, a set of 6 generally experienced success factors will be identified and analyzed supported through the study of previous researches and studies.
The review of literature provided by previous studies suggests that two out of six success factors, namely “Support from the Top Management of Organization” and “The effectiveness of the software and hardware on which the ERP is implemented” are the most important ones, so they will be paid especial attention while analyzing the importance and effectiveness of all six factors.
In the end, a list of hypothesis testing will also be provided which will help to analyze whether the research objectives are met or not and whether the study has proved to be helpful in understand the Implementation of ERP systems in the State of Qatar or not.
Timeline
Time plays a crucial role in the completion of a research project. Researcher should realize the exact amount of time to logically address the research problem and its analysis, however, this must remain flexible to allow for unforeseen factors. Timescales have to be appropriate, realistic and achievable.
Swetnam, in his book, has written a general guide for any extended project or research is to plan to use only 75% of the supposed time available (Swetnam, 2004), which should be tentatively allocated as follows: –
- Introduction 5%
- Literature review 35%
- Research methods 10%
- Data collection 20%
- Analysis 15%
- Conclusions and recommendations 10%
- Bibliography and appendices 5%
Time Scale
List of References
Banerjee, J., 2008. Oracle Apps DBA. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
Chan, E., 2009. Knowledge Management (KM) Using Enterprise Resource Planning. Research Report. Melbourne: RMIT University.
Dobney, 2011. Qualitative research. Web.
Joe, N., Matti, R. & Jari, T., 2004. ERP revelations: The dynamics of contextual Forces of ERP Implementation. In ECIS 2004. Helsinki. Association of Information Systems.
Nah, F., Lau, J. & Kuang, J., 2001. Critical factors for successful implementation of enterprise systems. Business Process Management, 7(3), pp.285-96.
Ngai, E., Law, H. & Wat, F., 2008. Examining the critical success factors in the adoptation of ERP systems. Research Report. Kowloon: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Stewart, G., 2000. Organizational Readiness for ERP Implementation. In Americas Conference on Information Systems. Brisbane. Queensland university of Technology.
Swetnam, D., 2004. Writing your dissertation: how to plan, prepapre and present successful work. Oxford: How To Books Ltd.
Yingjie, J., 2005. Critical Success Factors in ERP Implementation in Finland. Research Report. Helsinki: Swedish School of Economics & Business Administration.