Does Size Matter? The Implications of Firm Size on Enterprise Systems Success

Abstract

With the increasing emphasis on globalization and consumer demands in highly competitive markets, organizations have attempted to integrate and standardize across their corporate subsidiaries by implementing Enterprise Systems (ES). In such corporate-wide ES implementations, system requirements are dictated by headquarters, favouring large subsidiaries, and thus potentially compromising the unique business requirements of smaller units. This research reports findings from an ES initiative within a group of large, medium, and small organizations, where the impact of organization size is assessed in relation to the level of system success and knowledge-management competence. The results of this analysis suggest that (i) large organizations, in contrast to their smaller counterparts, receive greater benefits in terms of both Individual and Organizational Impacts, (ii) while no such differences were observed in relation to System and Information Quality. Similarly, (iii) no differences were observed in relation to knowledge-creation competencies amongst large, medium, and small organizations. However, (iv) differences were observed between the large and smaller firms on their Knowledge-Retention and Knowledge-Transfer competencies.