Explaining ERP users (dis)satisfaction: a case study

During the last decade organisations have invested huge amounts of money in socalled Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems are integrated information systems targeting functional areas of purchasing, production, marketing, sales, human resources, administration, maintenance, warehousing, or physical distribution. Due to the integrative nature of ERP, these systems have an important advantage of efficient data registration: transactional data only have to be recorded once, and can be potentially be accessed by users from all functional areas. Furthermore, the integrative nature offers the potential of an integrated view on planning and control of business processes. We raise the question if managers from organisations using ERP systems are satisfied with the information retrieved from their ERP system. Ultimately, we want to determine the contingencies that explain the level of satisfaction of managers working with systems that use ERP philosophy. ERP philosophy is here defined as: working with an integrated information systems regardless the ERP vendor. Of course, research into the contingencies that explain the satisfaction of regular information systems is well known. However, we argue that the characteristics of a system using the ERP philosophy are different to such a degree that traditional contingency factors of information systems cannot fully explain ERP users (dis)satisfaction. This difference is mainly caused by the integrative aspects of an ERP system.