Jos van Hillegersberg

Enterprise resource planning: ERP adoption by European midsize companies

JE A N -F R A N C O IS P O D EV IN U ntil recently, the major ERP vendors (SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, and Baan) were mainly targeting the high end of the market (companies with more than 1,000 employees), but this market comes close to saturation. Many large companies have already adopted ERP systems and are planning the next step of how to use the installed ERP infrastructures as foundations for e-business [1, 2]. Most of the smalland medium-sized companies still have to make the decision to deploy ERP. The midsize market is an interesting market, for example, the number of midsize companies (50–1,000 employees) in Europe is estimated to exceed 100,000. Data from our research shows that with average annual IT budgets of more than

Change factors requiring agility and implications for IT

500,000, the total European midsize market for IT products and services surpasses a staggering

The dynamics of factors affecting the adoption of innovations

50 billion per year. This market as a whole is very attractive for the major ERP vendors. However, since the wave of adoption by midsize companies is in its early stages, little is known about developments and drivers that form the basis of ERP adoption decisions. The purpose of this article is to understand developments in ERP adoption within the European mid-market. Our empirical information is based on a large-scale European multicountry/multi-industry survey conducted in mid-1998. Based on the survey data, we will address various issues, such as: How did ERP penetration in the mid-market develop until 1998 Yvonne van Everdingen, Jos van Hillegersberg, and Eric Waarts

Aligning IT components to achieve agility in globally distributed system development

The current highly dynamic business environment requires businesses to be agile. Business agility is the ability to swiftly and easily change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and internal changes. This study reports on a cross-industry analysis of change factors requiring agility and assesses agility gaps that companies are facing in four industry sectors in the Netherlands. A framework was constructed to measure the perceived gaps between the current level of business agility and the required level of business agility. The questionnaire and in-depth interviews held reveal that todays businesses perceive to lack the agility required to quickly respond to changes, whose speed and requirements are difficult to predict. The paper presents rankings of generic and sector-specific agility gaps. These show that although some generic change factors requiring agility exist, the change factors requiring agility that cause agility gaps differ across industry sectors. Among the factors that enable or hinder business agility, the existence of inflexible legacy systems is perceived to be a very important disabler in achieving more business agility. A number of basic principles and directions are discussed to transform Information Technology from barrier into key enabler for increased agility in organizations and business networks.

Supporting return flows in the supply chain

An abundance of IT innovations are constantly struggling for market acceptance. Various models have been proposed in the literature in order to aid understanding of the principles behind the adoption of IT innovations, but most of them implicitly assume that the factors explaining adoption decisions do not change over time. This study challenges that assumption and adds to the existing literature by investigating the dynamics of the factors influencing adoption. Our general proposition is that the driving factors in adopting innovations will change as the diffusion of the innovation in the market progresses. A large-scale empirical study was carried out among medium-sized companies in a variety of European countries and industries concerning the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The findings strongly indicate that the factors affecting late adoption of ERP differ significantly from the factors explaining early adoption. At early stages of the diffusion process adoption tends to be especially driven by a combination of internal strategic drives and attitudes of the firm together with external forces like industry competition and supplier activities. Later on, the mix of adoption stimulating factors seems to be focusing more on implementation issues such as the scalability of the system, the number of seats and the yearly available budget. The study leads to both new methodological insights and substantive conclusions that also have practical implications.

The software component market on the internet current status and conditions for growth

Agile IT strategy, infrastructure, and project management are key elements for realizing agility in GDSD projects.

Using metamodeling to integrate object-oriented analysis, design and programming concepts

R eturn flows, which consist of products at the end of their economic life cycle, or that have become obsolete in the forward supply chain, are gaining importance. Due to shortening of economic life cycles for products like consumer electronics, the recovery of value from products after use is becoming a necessity. In addition , the shift from buying products to buying sets of services makes the reuse of recovered materials, parts, and products desirable. Besides such economic factors, the depletion of natural resources and environmental considerations also provide arguments to reuse materials, parts, and even complete products. The logistics of return flows, called reverse logistics , aims at executing product recovery efficiently. One must design optimal take-back and collection strategies, as well as recovery processes, which may range between the reuse of the whole product (cleaning and repair) and the recovery of materials from products by reducing the products to small pieces. The incorporation of return flows in supply chain management is easier said than done, as the behavior of consumers introduces uncertainties in the quality, quantity, and timing of product returns. Effective information and communication technology (ICT) support is needed to manage return flows, but surprisingly, the information systems field has paid little attention to reverse logistics. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages and advanced planning systems (APS) concerned with the forward flows in the supply chain have only addressed this topic incidentally. Here, we examine return flows in more detail and present required extensions to ERP and APS-based reverse logistics theory. We further explore e-commerce opportunities for managing return flows and present a case study of a company that has set up advanced ICT support for recovery processes. The management of return flows appears on the strategic agenda of a growing number of organizations. Several factors motivate this development. Governmental policy and legislation, especially in Europe, have recently forced manufacturers to take responsibility for the take-back of used goods from customer markets. These developments were preceded by environmental regulations restricting the disposal of (hazardous) product and packaging materials. Besides governmental constraints, customer awareness is creating opportunities for green branding and new markets for returned goods. Moreover, return flows can reduce production costs by replacing raw materials. For many companies, the recovery of value from used products may provide a good return on investments. Another trend contributing to the growth of return flows is the growing perception …

Potential of Webservices to enable smart business networks

Component Based Development (CBD) promises a large step forward in the quest for maximizing reuse in software development. Although a variety of definitions of CBD exists, key to CBD is the process of building systems by way of combination and integration of pre-engineered and pre-tested software components. For CBD to be the long awaited breakthrough in software development, the efficient reuse of software components has to be organized by a market system; Components develop their full potential only in a component market [5]. Organizations may benefit from organizing an internal component market. Software components can then be reused over multiple projects saving valuable resources. However, the most appropriate marketplace to buy and sell components would be the Internet: an international, freely accessible network, which is perfectly suited for offering, promoting and distributing components. A flourishing component market on the Internet would really allow organizations to buy and reuse against low-costs. Developers would only need to focus on functionality specific to the project, and on locating and integrating available components.Industry watchers have predicted huge growth figures for the software component market. Gartner predicts the component market will grow to

A Methodology to Support Web-Services Development Using Legacy Systems

7 billion in 2001, of which

Assessing Business Agility: A Multi-Industry Study in The Netherlands

2 billion directly comes from component sales [1]. Giga information group predicts an off-the-shelf component market of