# The Impact of Information Systems Implementation in the Greek Manufacturing Enterprises
## 5 Summary, Discussion, Conclusions, and Future Research  
This empirical research addresses issues regarding which ISs that North Greek manufacturers have adopted to conduct their business, as well as the impact and contribution of IS adoption in several aspects of their business, including the cost effectiveness. During the research, 96 questionnaires were filled by North Greek manufacturing companies. Of  
Figure 5: Impact of IS adoption—Level of profitability. Figure 6: Contribution of IS adoption—level of profitability. those 96 responses, 83 of them use at least one IS, and those are the ones that this paper addresses more in depth. The statistical analysis of those 83 responses has led to some very interesting results. The great majority of the companies (85.4%) use ERP to conduct their business. That is followed by WMS (39%), OMS (37.8%), CRM (35.4%), MES (25.6%), and MRP (20.7%) with a much lower percentage of companies that use them. The rest of the systems have a percentage of less than 14% each. Although SCM is relatively new and helps the companies to manage and organize the path a product or service needs to follow from the supplier to the customer integrating this whole chain, yet it is only used by 13.4% of the manufacturers. Even if the vast majority of them (90.4%) have invested in an IS in the last decade, which means that most of their systems are relatively new, the majority of the respondents state that they intent to invest in a new IS in the near future. As a general conclusion of this paper, it can be said that IS adoption has a positive impact in business--financially and nonfinancially. A main aspect that keeps business running is the profit they gain from their activities. The vast majority of the respondents (92.7%) agree that ISs have a positive effect on their profits as they are at least satisfied of the amount they gained. Managing a company is a challenging and difficult task. IS implementation helped the managers to improve the way they manage several business areas such as supply, production, distribution network, warehouse and inventory, as well as helping to improve their customer service. It is important that several departments of a company are able to work well individually but also as a part of the whole enterprise, communicating each other and forming a chain that would manage to deliver the product to the customers starting from their suppliers. Inventory management, Customer service and Warehouse management were more positively affected by IS adoption. On the other hand, Distribution network management was less positively affected by IS implementation. The lowest rank might be explained by the way the products are being distributed in Greece, as well as by her unique geography which contains many--big and small--islands. In mainland, the products are mostly distributed by road, as the rail network is not as modernized as of other countries (i.e., Italy). The islands make the distribution of a product a challenge because it must reach even the smallest one, which means companies must be able to take this into account when they send products there. The transportation in smaller islands is not so often, and it depends on the weather conditions, especially in the winter. ISs also positively contributed to Faster Customer service, Production process, Cost reduction and Competitive advantage as they all have an average rating more than 4--\"little positive\". The respondents also stated that they managed to maintain their clientele as it is close to 4, although it does not seem like IS helped a lot with Returned products reduction and the Relationship with the suppliers. The companies with a high level of profitability (IS1) and those with a relatively satisfying level of profitability (IS2) were compared regarding the impact of IS in several aspects of their business. Both groups assessed the impact of IS as positive with IS1 group's average ratings higher than those of IS2 group.