A development of enterprise resource planning success model for accounting professionals

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is commercial software that automates and integrates many or most of a firm’s business processes. It allows to access to integrated data cross the entire enterprise according to real-time. Therefore, ERP system is expected to increase productivity via processes standardization, to improve decision-making ability via information integration throughout the whole enterprise, to enhance cooperation between organizational entities by connecting them smoothly, and the most important, to maintain competitive advantage once these benefits are satisfied. These promises are possibly a close explanation of its increasing popularity. Namely, Fortune 500 companies are trusting ERP system1 and it is also a solution that large-sized organizations in Vietnam select and adopt more growingly2. Nevertheless, instead of achieving impressive benefits from their ERP systems, some firms have faced difficulties in gaining the benefits they expected. Therefore, for both researcher and executives, one of the initial interested-questions is whether investments in ERP will pay off. Several organizational-level econometric studies conducted give an answer that it is likely yes – on average. However, the impacts vary from enterprise to enterprise, even from module to module in which accounting-related modules are in charge of changed-focuses. In other words, ERP implementation has a considerable impact on accounting department of the business organizations. Hence, the executives’ next questions are probably to be, how can I maximize the positive impacts on accounting department? Is there some way to predict what the ultimate impacts of ERP systems on accounting professionals will be in order to achieve a goal of enhancing organizational performance? These questions are worth addressing. In attempting to do so, the author draws on D&M IS success model, IS-continuance theory and the principle “fitness for use” to develop the ERP success model for accounting professionals in order to make them more productive, which in turn improves performance of implemented organizations. The theoretical and empirical results indicate that organizational performance is, indeed, influenced by the extent to which accounting experts effectively utilize ERP systems in the adoption and ongoing context. This study makes an original contribution to both of theory and practice through forming and validating the ERP success model for accounting professionals only. In a little more detail, it provides empirical evidence regarding Hunton’s accounting value chain. In addition, it discovers and proves effective use as the most appropriate system-use concept so far. Moreover, it makes an effort to investigate outcomes of accounting benefits perceived from ERP system, which related-studies are much further under-researched. Last but not least, the research provides valuable implications for organization management on how they can successfully manage accounting department as well as accounting professionals in an attempt to maximize ERP’s impacts on organizational performance, which executives have paid much attention to for recent years but have not yet found out the answer so far.