Sustainability of ERPS performance outcomes: The role of post-implementation review quality

This paper examines the nature and timing of post-implementation activities for ERPS adopting firms. We extend both the scope and granularity of prior literature to use seven categories of post-implementation activities theorized in the Nicolaou [Nicolaou, A.I. (2004b), “Quality of post-implementation review for enterprise resource planning systems” Int J Account Inf Syst 5 (May): pp. 25–49.] framework as our unit of analysis. We also examine the timing of those post-implementation events and classify firms in clusters characterizing the timing of such activities. We find that both the nature of post-implementation events and their timing are important for post-implementation change making firms. Specifically, ERPS change firms demonstrate improved differential performance as a result of their use of post-implementation activities that contribute to better system implementation planning and business process effectiveness when undertaken shortly after the initial system implementation. On the other hand, system deployment-related post-implementation activities that typically occur at later stages of system operation appear to have a negative impact on a firm's short-run profitability. Our results should be of interest to ERPS adopting firms considering post-implementation changes. We find that no post-implementation change is universally good just as no timing is universally efficacious. Therefore, firms that match their post-implementation changes appropriately with the best timing for such changes stand to derive differential performance gains over peers that do not. However, some changes are inherently more risky.