Analysis of ERP Usage with Technology Acceptance Model

Introduction The environment of business changes so rapidly. Companies face of increasing competition, expanding markets, and rising customer expectations. This puts pressure on companies to lower costs, expand product choice, provide better customer service, improve quality, and coordinate demand, supply, and production (Shankarnarayanan, 2000). ERP contains businesses all functions and departments; and all business transactions are entered, recorded, processed, monitored, and reported. This provides departmental cooperation and coordination. But it enables companies to achieve their objectives of increased communication and responsiveness to all stakeholders (Dillon, 1999). Nevertheless, organizations often need to have organizational changes, which can cause negative impacts on structures, processes and cultures (Holland and Light, 1999). Usually, end users have negative attitudes towards the new information systems. For that reason, the success or failure of ERP implementation depends on the end users' behavioral intention to use. Thus, it is important to know the factors that influence ERP users' acceptance. This study is focused on end-user acceptance. The purpose is to achieve evidence about the factors that influence users towards accepting ERP systems. The paper is organized as follows; briefly discusses the relevant literature, research methodology, provides analysis and interpretations of the empirical findings and concludes the paper. Enterprise Resource Planning 1960's inventory control was important part of businesses. Businesses tried to keep inventory, to satisfy customer demand and stay in competitive. Most software packages were designed to handle inventory based on traditional inventory concepts (Ptak & Schragenheim, 2000). In the 1970's, it businesses could not consign of inventories. This led businesses to use material requirements planning (MRP) systems. MRP represented materials planning process which is bill of material files that identified the specific materials needed to produce each finished item, a computer could be used to calculate gross material requirements (Ptak & Schragenheim, 2000). In the 1980's, companies began to take advantage of the increased power and affordability of available technology. Manufacturing resources planning (MRP II) systems evolved to the financial accounting system and the financial management system along with the manufacturing and materials management systems. This system makes businesses to have a more integrated business system that derived the material and capacity requirements associated with a desired operations plan, allowed input of detailed activities, translated all this to a financial statement, and suggested a course of action to address those items that were not in balance with the desired plan (Ptak & Schragenheim, 2000). By the early 1990's, MRP II began to be expanded to incorporate all resource planning for the entire businesses. ERP can be used not only in manufacturing companies, but in any company that wants to enhance competitiveness by most effectively using all its assets, including information (Shankarnarayanan, 2000). Enterprise systems software packages undertake integration of all information about financial and accounting information, human resource information, supply chain information, and customer information. Implementation of ERP systems needs investment and time. Not only do ERP systems take a lot of time and money to implement, they can disrupt a company's culture, create extensive training requirements, and even lead to productivity and mistreat customer orders, at least in the short term can damage the bottom line (Stein, 1999). Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) Several theoretical models have been used to investigate the determinants of acceptance and use of new information technology (Venkatesh et al., 2003). …