Private and Public organisation invested (inject) a considerable amount of money on capital and resources in Information Systems (IS), hoping to have an instant results and improvement on business processes and performance . However, the findings of some studies seems not to agree with this expectation. Further, they point out that an inadequate system usability was the main key to the above shortcomings (Jasperson et al., 2005). This conduct (behaviour) was mostly observed in ERP implemented (adopted) organisation. The majority of organisation (companies) failed to realise the expected (instant) benefits. In other organisation ERP implementation was successful but actual return on investment and benefits realization of the returns of ERP was very poor after (post) the system go-live.
One of the main reasons for failures during the post adaptation stage was the poor utilization of the system due to the ERP systems not being accepted completely by the end-users. This research helped to identify several key factors affecting to acceptance of ERP system at the user level. Thus, study contributed to the research community and ERP management practices.
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The first objective of the research was to investigate the level of ERP acceptance within ERP implemented public organisation in KwaZulu-Nata. Findings suggested that level of end-users’ adoption of ERP system was in a fairly satisfactory level; but not in a high level. Therefore, organisation needed to put more effort to increase the adoption of ERP systems by focusing on influencing factors.
The second objective was to identify the factors influencing acceptance of ERP systems. In addition, analysis showed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and attitude towards use of system were positively correlated with symbolic adoption of ERP. Regression analysis confirmed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and attitude towards use of are enough to describe the behaviour of symbolic adoption of ERP by the end users. Majority of the respondents who participated in this survey had minimum of three years of experience in using ERP. Therefore, these findings could be directly used to manage the user expectations of organisation in synthesizing stage (assimilation) ERP life cycle where organisation actually started benefiting from use of ERP. This could be a reason for showing a low influence of social factors and facilitating conditions in determining the acceptance ERP by the end-users. According to the finding of previous researches, effect of social influence and facilitating conditions were high during the early stage of the ERP implementations, but not during later stages of ERP life cycle. Most of the times after go-live; managers’ concerned on user expectations diminishes with the time. As a result, the majority of the post-adoptive life cycle was without management attention and direction. Therefore, organisation should strongly consider reconvening the principals associated with such implementation efforts, after installation, to plan for and to provide the resources for the post-adoptive life cycle. Managing user expectations was one aspect that managers fail to fulfil. They need to get the user involvement in deciding training requirements, customization to ERP system, performance improvements, upgrades, etc. Organisation always should highlight the usefulness of ERP to enhance the performance of their jobs and ease of using the system. Workshops, trainings giving hands on experience would be beneficial to popularize the system among users. Creating a shared belief on the benefits of ERP was essential to create positive attitudes towards ERP systems. According to Venkatesh et al. attitudes was not significant in accepting ERP systems by the end users. But this research found that attitudes play a big role as similar to performance expectancy. Therefore, as argued by some other researchers (Nah et al., 2004), eliminating attitudes towards use of system was needed to be re-examined. According to this research, majority of users’ attitude on implementing ERP is positive. User perception on trainings was neutral; this is an indication to the low level of satisfaction on ERP trainings. Therefore, organisation had to consider on revising their training methodologies based on the requirements of users. This research studied about the moderating effect by
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