Decision Making for ERP Investments from the Perspective of Organizational Impact -Preliminary Results from an Empirical Study

This study addresses the complex relationship between decision making for ERP investments and the consideration of organizational impact under 2 different perspectives: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system decisions in organizations with Business Process Improvement (BPI) in particular Business Process Reengineering (BPR) efforts and ERP decisions without BPI/BPR efforts. On the basis of a questionnaire sent to 813 austrian middle und large scale organizations, this paper shows that companies have weighted the inquired decision aspects very differently. ERP decisions are frequently made without a complete consideration and evaluation of all inquired aspects. Furthermore mainly standard financial measures have been used to support the decision. We propose that ERP decision making models can be based on the concept of bounded rationality and satisficing