Triggers of Cloud ERP Adoption in SMEs

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) could benefit immensely with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that can support their business functions and manage their organization‘s information (Seethamraju and Seethamraju 2008). However, traditional ERP are highly resource intensive for its acquisition and maintenance (Light 2001), yet, most SMEs are unable to afford them (Fuller and McLaren 2010). Nonetheless, influence from the emergence of cloud computing (Armbrust et al. 2010), cloud ERP systems have been offered with a lower cost, specifically targeting SMEs. These systems (e.g. SAP‘s ByDesign) purport to revolutionarize SMEs. Cloud-based ERP systems are typically provided using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture, where users rent the software rather than buy it (Ivanov 2012). By renting the software, organizations can minimize the cost of implementation and maintenance, yet gain access to an ERP over the internet (Seitz 2010) Thus, cloud ERP allows SMEs to focus more on their core mission, without having to devote substantial resources maintaining ERP software (DePompa 2003). Nonetheless, the adoption of cloud ERP among SMEs still remains low; raising questions on SMEs cloud ERP adoption.