A Good Fit? Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in Loosely Coupled Organisational Systems

Enterprise Resource Planning systems that provide a packaged solution to data management problems across an enterprise are widely implemented in modern organisations. Ongoing efforts to deliver productive outcomes from implementing ERPs have ensured that this is an area of great interest to IS researchers and practitioners. This paper investigates the notion of ‘fit ’ of ERP to organisation with respect to the integration of data, processes, systems and practices implicit in an ERP and the coupling between an organisation’s subsystems. The outcomes of an intensive case study of a challenged ERP implementation highlight some of the risks of introducing an ERP into an organisation which can be described as a loosely-coupled system