The demand for training and consultancy investment in SME-specific ERP systems implementation and operation

This research examines the demand for the level of investment in training and consultancy necessary to successfully implement and operate small and medium sized enterprises (SME)-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in SMEs. The extant literature on ERP, as well as established business practices adopted by the majority of ERP vendors and trainers, suggests that in order to implement and operate ERP systems effectively, a training model including an extensive training period, and often utilising external consultants, is a necessary condition. An in-depth case study has been conducted in this research on a UK-based SME-specific ERP systems vendor, which maintain that their SME-specific ERP systems can be implemented and operated effectively with only five days of formal training and no additional consultancy. This research evaluates the validity of this claim, and investigates the basis for the training model employed by the case company is, or is not, sufficient for users to successfully implement and operate SME-specific ERP systems.     

ERP system usage: the role of control and empowerment

Organisations have made significant investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with the strategic expectation that employees will utilise this technology to enhance organisational performance. However, research indicates that ERP systems are underutilised. In order to disentangle the challenge of underutilisation, this paper addresses the impact of organisational control and empowerment on infusion—the deep and comprehensive usage of an information system. Moreover, it also tests whether infusion will lead to higher levels of ERP system success. Data from a sample of 260 matched pairs of ERP system users and their supervisors were collected and analysed. Results indicate that empowerment is positively related with infusion, whereas an inverted u‐relationship has been found for organisational control. The critical link between infusion and ERP system success was found as well, meaning that the more users utilise the system to its fullest extent, the more likely the organisation is to attain ERP systems' promised benefits.     

Traditional food traders in developing countries and competition from supermarkets: Evidence from Indonesia

Indonesia’s urban centers recently underwent an explosion of supermarkets. With cheaper, higher quality commodities and better services, supermarkets have the potential to drive traders in traditional markets out of business. In this paper, we evaluate whether this is indeed the case. We find that traditional traders experienced declines in their business. However, both qualitative and quantitative findings indicate that the main cause of decline is not supermarkets. Instead, traditional markets are plagued with internal problems and face increasingly bitter competition from street vendors. Therefore, the policy recommendations include strengthening traditional traders and seriously tackling the problem of street vendors.     

Does Competition Lead to Agglomeration or Dispersion in EMR Vendor Decisions?

We examine hospital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) vendor adoption patterns and how they relate to hospital market structure. As in many network technology adoption decisions, hospitals face countervailing incentives to coordinate or differentiate in their choice of vendors. We find evidence of substantial agglomeration on EMR vendors, which increases as hospital markets become more competitive. These findings suggest that incentives to coordinate dominate incentives to differentiate overall, and the relative balance grows stronger in favor of coordination as markets become more competitive. Our findings also have important implications regarding antitrust policy. A potential downside of hospital consolidation—increased obstacles in information sharing due to vendor differentiation—should be taken into account in evaluation of hospital mergers.     

Intraorganizational information and communication technology diffusion: Implications for industrial sellers and buyers

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) like CRM, ERP and Intranet are considered important for creating competitive advantage. Despite their rapid deployment rates, only a few studies mainly from the information technology (IT) and engineering literature have been devoted in uncovering the factors that influence the diffusion of new information technologies within an organization. Similarly, empirical studies regarding the impact of ICT diffusion on organizations are strikingly limited. In an attempt to fill this research void, the present study examines the implementation of ICT tools within marketing-related and non-marketing-related functions. By testing a number of hypotheses using structural equation modeling, the authors conclude that the antecedents and consequences of ICT diffusion in these functions vary. Their findings provide the foundation for a more thorough examination of both intraorganizational diffusion of ICT tools as well as their impact on organizations.     

First organise, then automate: a modern socio-technical view on ERP systems and teamworking

Previous empirical work demonstrated that self-managing teamwork and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are difficult to combine in practice, and have called for the development of templates for configuring ERP systems to support teamworking. This requires a view on organisation design, dealing with both in an integrated fashion. 'Modern Socio-technology' provides such a view. We discuss its underlying principles and show how it relates to ERP.     

The core‐peripheral structure of international knowledge flows: evidence from patent citation data

The importance of knowledge diffusion and external knowledge is generally acknowledged for their vital role to innovation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the international knowledge diffusion structure and its evolution using patent citation networks for three periods. The analyses are carried out from overall, active cluster as well as individual connection perspectives with the help of measures from social network analysis. Results show an obvious core‐peripheral structure of international knowledge diffusion. Most of the flows happen within core group. Knowledge flows between core and peripheral numbers also widely exist but not strong, while the flows among peripheral numbers are both sparse and weak. Significant improvements widely exist among Asian countries and regions according to their knowledge absorption and influence capacities, and Chinese Taiwan and South Korea are the most outstanding new stars among them with worthwhile experiences for other catch‐ups. It also suggests that BRICS and South–South knowledge linkages play an increased role in developing and emerging economy innovation systems as they gain momentum.     

ERP application in China: An overview

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are among the most important enablers for business intelligence and planning functionality in supply chains. We provide an overview of ERP research and its development and implementation in China. We describe the current market, challenges and future trends for ERP software in China. Cases are provided where ERP implementations have been used to enhance supply chain management of major companies. One of the (not unexpected) findings is that not only analytical data concepts play an important role in successful ERP implementations in China but also cultural and language aspects.     

Understanding ERP system implementation in a hospital by analysing stakeholders

Implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems requires significant organisational, as well as technical, changes. These will affect stakeholders with varying perspectives and interests in the system. This is particularly the case in health care, as a feature of this sector is that responsibility of services is shared between many autonomous units. In these and similar settings, it is essential to analyse stakeholders and to understand their expectations and attitudes towards the system. Such an understanding will help implementers to address stakeholder interests and to encourage acceptance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretically based model to analyse how stakeholder attitudes and behaviours in a hospital setting affect the outcome of ERP implementation. This model is applied in an empirical study of a project to introduce an ERP system in medium‐sized hospital in The Netherlands. The study shows how the ERP implementation impacts the interests of stakeholders such as physicians and administrators, which caused tensions. The paper examines the reasons of these tensions. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of ERP implementation in health care and any other similar sectors from a stakeholder perspective, and it may help implementers to manage this more effectively.     

The Institutionalization of an Electronic Marketplace in China, 1998–2010

The paper traces the evolution of the electronic marketplace in China from 1998 to 2010. According to an application of actor network theory and institutional theory, the e‐marketplace was co‐constructed and institutionalized by various participating actors in interwoven diffusion and legitimation processes. A content analysis of news articles reveals key actors who helped develop and shape the e‐marketplace: consumers, online vendors, online criminals, technology companies, transaction platforms, entrepreneurs, professional associations, banks, and the government. The analysis of their interrelationships and major events reveals four distinct stages in the institutionalization of the e‐marketplace in China: novelty, incubating, empowering, and growth. Unique problems emerge at each stage, and different types of actors enter the actor network at different phases, playing unique roles in the co‐creation process to establish cultural, normative, and regulatory legitimacy. Many varied agents participated in a transformational process specific to the macro‐socioeconomic and technological environment of China, which featured particular institutional forms. eBay's failure to maintain a first‐mover advantage in China helps illustrate that global companies must understand political, economic, cultural, and institutional environments before considering expansion.     

Outsourcers’ control mechanisms,vendors’ contract schemas,and project performance in cross-border IT outsourcing: A vendor’s perspective

Relational conflicts are likely to occur in cross-border IT outsourcing between partners with different cultural backgrounds. Extant literature diverges on the role of contract and trust as control mechanisms in managing relational conflicts. Prior studies have examined the effectiveness of the control mechanisms primarily from the outsourcer’s perspective, with little consideration of how vendors interpret outsourcers’ control mechanisms. Based on psychological contract theory, this study addresses the effects of contract-based and trust-based control mechanisms on relational conflicts from the vendor’s perspective and further explores the contingency of the effects on vendors’ psychological contract schemas (transactional contract schema and relational contract schema) towards their relationships with outsourcers. Based on survey data from 180 offshore outsourcing IT projects, the results show that vendors’ transactional contract schema reduces the effect of trust-based control whereas vendors’ relational contract schema strengthens the effect of outsourcers’ contract-based control on relational conflict. Relational conflicts, in turn, exhibit a negative impact on project performance. The findings offer new insights into the role of outsourcers’ contract-based control and trust-based controls in relationship management from a vender’s perspective. The findings also extend the outsourcing governance literature by illustrating the contingency of the control mechanisms on vendors’ psychological contract schemas.     

The Effects of Market Network Heterogeneity on Innovation Diffusion: An Agent‐Based Modeling Approach

Innovations usually have an initial impact on very few people. The period of learning or early evaluation precedes the diffusion of the technology into the wider addressed population. More than a transfer, this is best characterized as communication of benefits, costs, and compatibility with earlier technologies and a relative assessment of the new state of the art. Innovation development by an organization or individual creates not just a device (i.e., process or tacit knowledge) but concomitantly a capacity on the part of other organizations or persons to use, adopt, replicate, enhance, or modify the technology, skills, or knowledge for their own purposes. How innovations actually diffuse is to understand the communication of progress, and this framing helps one to design innovations and also design the marketing and testing programs to ready innovations for market and launch them efficiently. Diffusion theory's main focus is on the flow of information within a social system, such as via mass media and word‐of‐mouth communications. This theory presents often in the form of mathematical models of innovation and imitation. Distinct from classical diffusion models, however, consumers are not all identical in how they connect to others within a market or how they respond to information. We examine the effects of various network structures and relational heterogeneity on innovation diffusion within market networks. Specifically, network topology (the structure of how individuals in the market are connected) and the strength of communication links between innovator and follower market segments (a form of relational heterogeneity) are studied. Several research questions concerning network heterogeneity are addressed with an agent‐based modeling approach. The present study's findings are based on simulation results that show important effects of network structure on the diffusion process. The ability to speed diffusion varies significantly according to within‐ and cross‐segment communications within a heterogeneous network structure. The implications of the present approach for new product diffusion are discussed, and future research directions are suggested that may add useful insights into the complex social networks inherent to diffusion. A simple summary is that discovery of significant prime communicator nodes in a network allows innovation development practices to be better calibrated to realistically multiple market segments.     

Acts of hidden franchisee innovation and innovation adoption within franchise systems

Franchising, as an imitative business model, provides a challenging context to create and manage innovation, as franchisors may wish to limit their franchisees' innovative activities to ensure network consistency. Drawing on data from two related empirical studies of franchisees operating in the UK, we seek to understand how franchisees contribute to innovation within their systems. Our first quantitative study reveals that although many franchisees develop innovations, these innovations are not always adopted by the franchise system, suggesting acts of hidden innovation. These findings motivated our second, qualitative study. Through a case analysis of 29 franchisees from 7 different franchise systems, we identify a number of organizational and relational factors that influence both franchisee engagement in innovation, and the extent to which their innovations are disclosed to the network. From these, we develop a theoretical framework of franchisee-led innovation processes, which contributes to the role of social exchange theory in innovation practices within business-to-business contexts. Our findings extend emerging research on innovation in franchise systems, and also provide practical insights on how franchisees can be best supported in creating and disclosing innovations to benefit the franchise system.     

The role of mobile handsets in advanced network service evolution: Evidence from Japan

This paper aims at a better understanding of the mechanisms of mobile network service evolution through a closer examination of the context of mobile handsets. It aims first to establish quantitatively that mobile handsets are a determinant of mobile network service evolution patterns, and second, to develop a consistent perspective capable of explaining the evolution of various mobile network services. Despite the fact that mobile handsets are indispensable to users of mobile network services, surprisingly little is known about the role of these handsets in mobile network service evolution. This paper provides quantitative evidence of a positive relationship between intra-network-carrier penetration rates for mobile network service subscribers and mobile handsets designed for these services. The relationship is such that if one network service is diffused more than another, the mobile handsets related to the more diffused service are similarly more widely diffused in the market, and vice versa. The evidence is derived from an analysis of two mobile network services in Japan, mobile Internet and third generation mobile, initiated by NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. There are no existing studies that consistently explain the mechanisms of different mobile network service evolution patterns. Since the positive relationship that emerges from the analysis is consistent for both cases, by examining the mechanisms underlying this relationship, the paper develops an adequate and consistent perspective based on a constituent model reflecting the technological and competition structure of mobile network services. From this perspective, this positive relationship can be explained as the similarity or dissimilarity in essential technology ownership distribution across constituents. This perspective describes mobile network evolution in terms of changes in the distribution of essential technology ownership and, therefore, could be generalised more widely.     

A quantitative assessment of innovation dynamics and R&D management in Japanese and West German telecommunications

Abstract
Among the industrial countries, different working divisions have evolved between manufacturing industry, governments and network operators, each being responsible for distinct parts of R&D in the telecommunications field. This paper provides a comparison of R&D in Japan and West Germany to several western industrial countries and highlights their diverse structures.
For this quantitative assessment various indicators for science and technology (S&T) have been compiled systematically. The new aspect of this paper is that indicators, only some of which are well established, can be interconnected provided that appropriate limitations are recognised. A comprehensive indicator system for research and development in telecommunications is currently not available as far as the author is aware. Consequently, subjective expert assessments are essential for the present indicator systems to overcome incomplete links between indicators, their poor adaptation to one another and data availability problems . The statistical sections here are therefore supplemented by a series of personal discussions in various countries.     

Coordination of a production network with a single buyer and multiple vendors

This article considers a single buyer sourcing a single product from a network of homogeneous suppliers. We assume a close and cooperative relationship between buyer and vendors and suggest two coordination mechanisms, which differently affect where inventory is held in the system. Accordingly, we derive analytical and heuristic solutions for both alternatives and study the relative advantage of the models in a sensitivity analysis. Finally, propositions for future research are presented.     

中国汽车市场变局

2011年对中国汽车产业而言是一个五味杂陈的年景,受宏观经济环境及紧缩政策影响,整体车市在前两年的极度红火之后迅速转向平淡,自下半年开始,中国汽车产销量出现了27个月以来的首次下降。唯独中高端及高端市场却逆势增长。寒冬?拐点?在多方调控措施的重压下,中国汽车市场在2012年将何去何从?下一波爆发力会由哪些支撑点来驱动?故事就从异常火热的中高端市场开始讲起。     

Recent Developments in US Industrial Relations

The persistence of economic pressures that first challenged American industry in the 1970s continues to reshape US industrial relations. In an effort to maintain their competitiveness, US firms have developed a panoply of strategies ranging from confrontation and labour control to collaboration and employee empowerment. This essay reviews evidence relating to the development and diffusion of these alternative strategies and their implications for long-term US competitiveness. In this context, the recent work of Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations is discussed as well as a number of public policy options intended to facilitate the implementation of high value-added production systems. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of recent trends for industrial relations research.     

Mapping network champion behavior in B2B electronic venturing

This study examines the concept of a new venture, B2B e-market in the light of participants who are involved in its innovation and diffusion processes. Our assessment results in the development of two key working propositions. The first proposition attempts to explain the relationship of the participants in the network and their contribution to innovation and diffusion processes over time. The second proposition attempts to explain how network champions (NC) contribute by bringing suppliers and buyers together in an electronic marketplace over time. In particular, this research adds to the industrial marketing literature by applying a case research method that is particularly useful for operationalizing theory development in business-to-business environments.     

浅谈AHP分析法在服装外贸中应用

本文在综合考虑评价服装加工厂商的五个因子的基础上,根据AHP分析法原理和方法,建立起服装加工厂商的层次评价模型,经过数据处理后得出方案层对目标层的权向量,并确定选择服装加工厂商的方案。AHP分析法将服装加工厂商的定性和定量评价有效地结合起来,在当前国内外经济形势下,对于服装外贸企业有效控制生产成本具有一定的借鉴意义。