ERPs in SMEs: Ex-Post Evaluation of Success Factors

In the latest years, the offering of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) started to target in part the Public Administrations (PA's) and, above all, the Small / Medium Enterprises (SMEs), both by software multinational corporations and by local software houses. The introduction of ERPs into SMEs cannot be based on a sheer reproduction of the experiences with larger companies and represents a new challenge with significant peculiarities to be considered. Therefore, it's of particular interest to analyze the operating implementations, in order to identify the success cases, the nature and measure of the benefits obtained and the contextand 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, with the aim of evaluating these experiences ex-post, by examining some improvement indicators associated with some context and project characteristics. The results suggest that the ERP introduction is (in an unexpected measure) evaluated as a success and that the benefits obtained are mostly related to the simplification of internal procedures, a much easier information retrieval, an improved performance management and some increase in production efficiency. These results seem mostly related with a wide and deep organizational innovation, and with the type of the chosen ERP producer.