identifies for a company’s management, who may be contemplating investment in ERP, what factors
need to be appraised beforehand for their inclusion in operational plans and strategies so as to gain the
long-term benefits, like competitive advantage, from the investment. The factors that our study
identified that require this prior assessment and good understanding of were: the ERP’s system
attributes, the internal and external organisational environment and the desired benefits and strategic
values sought from it. Managers need to gain information from various sources on these factors in
their ERP project planning and include not only vendor recommended sources but draw from their
personal networks to help work towards ultimately achieving competitive advantage (Table 2).
To build upon our initial work in this area further studies should be done to investigate the
influence of other antecedent factors on competitive advantage, such as competence of ERP
consultants, having a good steering committee, and careful selection of ERP package. We examined
factors that influence the adoption stage of ERP and also contribute to competitive advantage from it. It
would be potentially useful to examine the factors that influence the achievement of other stages of
the ERP deployment process, like implementation, and use, to identify which of those have influence
upon subsequent competitive advantage, too. Our examination of factors that need assessment at the
adoption stage of ERP in order to help achieve competitive advantage prompts the question about the
sustainability of competitive advantage. A further opportunity for research, therefore, could be to
conduct a longitudinal study to investigate the sustainability of competitive advantage gained by
organisations after adopting ERP.
One of the limitations of our study is that it is based upon cross-sectional data at one point in time
that indicates the apparent influence of certain factors on competitive advantage from ERP projects. To
further establish our findings, longitudinal studies could be done using our methodology and/or
similar studies could be undertaken in other countries to see if our findings are replicated. A further
limitation is that the data for our study were collected in a country which can be considered a
technologically advanced one and so our findings should be applied with caution in industry
environments with less advanced technological infrastructures.