Procurement of enterprise resource planning systems: experiences with some Hong Kong companies

Abstract

Many cases of adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been reported in the literature. Some of the adopted ERP systems fail to satisfy the customer's requirements, despite the high spending and substantial efforts that have been put into the adoption exercise. This is undoubtedly unsatisfactory. A way to avoid this problem is to adopt a well planned, managed, and controlled ERP procurement process. This paper describes our studies of three Chinese companies in Hong Kong which have adopted ERP systems. We report the experience of these companies, and discuss how the Chinese culture might have shaped the procurement practices in their ERP adoption exercises.