In that case, action is a not necessarily a mandatory consequence ofa research approach. The paper by S. Le Loarne has been chosen to illustrate this trend: consequences of a problematic implementation are observed and detailed; including centralization, standardisation of activities and poor consistence of the standard processes with operational reality; leading to a description of how the users have to bypass the system in order to be able to perform their daily work. While the author makes the hypothesis that transgression is required for handling such problems, other possibilities will be suggested by the subsequent articles of this special issue.
A clear point when considering ERP implementation is that both the characteristics of the company and the way the project is conducted have a critical influence on the success of the implementation process. We have selected for this special issue two articles aiming at identifying the key success factors of an ERP implementation process, through two very different approaches: generalisation from some industrial cases, which is the most commonly used method, and statistical analysis based on a more considerable sample of experiments. J. Motwani, R. Subramanian and P. Gopalakrishna compare four implementations of ERP systems, and draw generic conclusions on the basis of an expert interpretation of what happened in the considered companies. On the other hand, I.C. Eihe and M. Madsen suggest using a factor analysis method to extract critical factors from 36 implementation case studies; identified through a questionnaire. Eight factors have been extracted from the 38 candidates, explaining 86% of the variance on the results. In spite of the convergence of their conclusions, it is interesting to notice that whereas Motwani et al. insist on the capacity of the companies to evolve, through their reactivity, learning capacity or change management practice, Eihe and Madsen focus on project management issues (project management principles, process re-engineering, top management support or consulting services availability). Both frameworks can be fruitfully applied to the case study of Le Loarne, leading to identify possible reasons of the difficulties emphasised in this article. In all cases, these contributions allow to clearly state a central problem of the implementation issue, namely the respective degree of adaptation, which is expected from the company and from the software in order to perform the integration of an efficient informationsystem and a competitive organisation. This matter will be developed with various points of views in the following contributions.
As it has been often underlined, distinguishing between successful and non-successful implementation of ERP systems can be a difficult task, as most of the companies are reluctant to communicate on their difficulties.
不要软件翻译的，谢谢～