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tion means an increase in “Perceived Net
Benefits” from ERP usage.
were IT executives, 31% financial executives,
and 30% ERP responsible. They had an average
of 15.7 years of experience in ERP systems, and
they came from a broad spectrum of industries,
with a strong focus in manufacturing (61%).
Most of the companies had finalized their ERP
implementation, and were constantly adding new
functionalities and upgrades to the ERP they had
implemented.
The number of ERP users was 72% of the total
number of potential users.
ERP Systems
are an
important part (63%) of the overall information
processing. The ERP systems were mainly used in
primary business processes (85%), but were also
used (71%) in secondary business processes. 75%
of business processes used master data and 76%
of business processes were integrated through the
ERP system. ERP system was, to a lesser extent,
used for integrating business processes residing
in subsidiaries, customers, or suppliers, and was
dropped from further analysis. With respect to
support of business processes by ERPs, it was
found that most companies had extensive support
for sales, production, procurement and finance
(between 4.6 and 5.9 on the Likert scale). However,
the results show that there was very little support
from the ERP for marketing, R&D and HR (all
below 3.0 on the Likert scale). Thus, these items
were dropped in the final analysis. With regards to
more specific users of the system, the hierarchic
tactical and operational levels revealed a fairly high
degree of use, with means on the Likert scale of
5 and 5.88, respectively. The strategic level had
a lower usage level, below 3.0, and was dropped
from further analysis. The benefits measurements
exhibited means of 3.35 to 5.19.
The rest of the paper describes the results and
conclusions from the testing of the model. Before
proceeding, there is one limitation that needs to
be reflected upon, namely, the organizational size.
The ambition was to develop a model aimed at
measuring the extent of ERP's utilization in SMEs.
However, the organizational size of our sample is
not coherent with our definition of SMEs, from
•
Proposition 1d: Increase measured as
Depth related to ERP systems utiliza-
tion means an increase in “Perceived Net
Benefits” from ERP usage.
MethodoLogY
To test the ERP utilization model, we collected
data through a survey of 77 Swedish firms using
the ERP system Movex (Movex is now re-named
to M3 and owned by Lawson). In the data collec-
tion process, we collaborated with the Swedish
Movex User Association who invited Movex to
use firms to participate in the study (cf. Hitt et
al.'s (2002) study). The questionnaire consisted
of four parts - background information, questions
regarding implementation, use (17 items), and
perceived ERP benefits gained from ERP
usage
(five items). The background information provided
basic information about the company and the
respondent. The implementation part explained
which, when, in what way and how much of the
ERP was implemented; use helped determine
in what way and on which levels the company
used the ERP; finally, the respondents answered
subjectively the extent to which they had received
benefits from the ERP, i.e., common method bias
problem. The survey contained 28 items, excluding
the background information, and the items were
measured based on a seven-point Likert scale
with parts in percentages, as indicated in Table 1.
The four dimensions: volume, breadth, diversity,
and depth, as well as benefits measurements were
operationalized, as is evident in Table 1.
Perceived
net benefits
were measured in
relation to the following five categories of ben-
efits: operational benefits, managerial benefits,
strategic benefits, IT infrastructural benefits, and
organizational benefits (Shang & Seddon, 2002).
The results of the demographic data collected
in the survey revealed that 32% of the respondents
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