Identification and assessment of risks to successful exploitation of ERP systems in China

The research presented in this paper aims at identifying, assessing and discussing potential risks that Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE) may encounter when using, maintaining and enhancing their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the post-implementation phase. The need for the research emerged from the growing awareness in the filed that there is a lack of studies addressing the organisational exploitation of ERPs after the implementation stage. The study adopted a deductive research design based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey. This survey was preceded by a Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) analysis and a set of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT) analyses. The PEST and SWOT analyses enabled the researchers to narrow the scope of the study and identify an appropriate industry sector and region to base the study on, namely the Electronic and Telecommunication Manufacturing Sector in Guangdong province. The questionnaire design was based on a theoretical risk ontology drawn from a systematic literature review process, which consisted of 40 predefined ERP risks. The questionnaire was sent to the operational managers and the information technology (IT) managers of 118 SOEs in Guangdong in China, from which 42 (84 questionnaires) valid and usable responses were received and analysed. The findings identified a set of 16 top prioritised ERP exploitation risks, which concentrate around operational, analytical, organisation-wide and technical issues. The study also explored and identified 10 correlations between the risks identified.