1 ERP Customisation, User Satisfaction and Operational Performance of Organisations: Investigating the Links

There is anecdotal evidence that standards enforced by ERP systems are often in conflict with user demands. With lesser customization, ERP implementation projects are more likley to finish on time and budget; however, customization makes users happy. Also, in customised ERP, organisations run the risk of losing out on the benfit of best-processes factored in ERP packages. Organizations are therefore faced with a dilemma of whether to customize the ERP package for user satisfaction and acceptance or re-engineering existing business processes to match ERP enforced standards to achieve benefits of best-processes and improve organizational performance. In this resesearch we investigate this issue. Our findings indicate that the level of ERP customization has significant moderating influence on the relationship between user satisfaction and operational performance in organizations. Our findings also indicate that the level of user satisfaction in customized ERP implementations is high but the high satisfaction does not translate to operational performance because of the negative moderating effect of ERP customization. Implications of the findings are discussed.