Competitive Advantage and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Some Conflicts in the Value-Chain

Whether an organization gains a competitive advantage (CA) from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a topic of much debate in the literature. However, when we differentiate between the stakeholders in the ERP value-chain and their relative CA positions, the literature is curiously silent. We depict the ERP value-chain as having three stakeholders: an ERP vendor, an ERP partner or re-seller, and the ERP end-users or client. The paper suggests how the interests these stakeholders have in maintaining or improving their CA in their own markets is complex and in some circumstances may hinder the development of future ERPs. This paper formulates a set of propositions to address this gap in our knowledge. We close the paper by proposing eight scenarios and suggesting how these and our propositions may be explored empirically.