Purpose: In literature, there is not sufficient research of the impact of Enterprise Resource planning (ERP) usage on firm performance for small and medium sized Swedish companies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide clarifications regarding this topic by investigating two research questions: What factors drive ERP usage in small- and medium- sized Swedish enterprises? Does ERP usage affect Firm Performance in small- and medium- sized Swedish enterprises?  Design/Methodology/Approach: To approach our research questions 10 hypotheses are constructed based on previous studies. Further, to gather the data required to test these hypotheses, a survey was sent to 1000 Swedish small- and medium-size enterprises which generated 100 responses. The data was later analyzed using a Partial Least Square Structural Model.  Findings: The first outcome of this study is that the main drivers of ERP usage in Swedish small- and medium-sized enterprises are Top Management Support and Effective Project Management. The second outcome is that ERP usage has a significant positive impact on Firm Performance.  Contribution/implication: The main practical contribution derived from our results is that small- and medium-size firms should focus on Top management support and Effective project management in order to increase their ERP usage, which in turn could lead to greater levels of firm performance. In the theoretical spectrum, we contribute to the literature by enhancing the importance of effective project management not previously tested in the ERP usage context and by adding question marks regarding the effect of certain variables on ERP usage.

This paper presents the work in progress regarding an international research project based on an empirical survey. It focuses on the early stages of making the adoption decision, thereafter evaluating and selecting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system prior to implementation in Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). The project seeks to close some of the identified gaps in ERP research. In addition, it attempts to link the results of the early stages of decision making to implementation, usage and evolution success in order to allow important conclusions to be made, for example, on the best practices in decision making or decision quality and success. This project will be restricted to the case of ERP software but will also give insights into the potential of integrating ERP and other important applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Supply Chain Management (SCM). The proposed research seeks to identify any differences and similarities contributing to the analysed research areas between British and Austrian companies. The choice of companies originating from two different regions in Europe is an important precondition in order to formulate results that will be applicable to the European Union in general. Due to the pervasive nature of ERP systems, our research results should be of interest to a wide range of professional and scholarly communities (from software engineering to accounting), in addition to the Information Systems (IS) field. The results presented should especially help practitioners in SMEs facing the important task of introducing an ERP system into their company. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

Background: ERP systems were perceived as the most significant invention for corporations during the rise of information technology in 1990s (Davenport, 1998). Today ERP systems are a multibillion dollar business and used by both LEs and SMEs. Using an ERP system is a continuous project and it is important to constantly look for misalignments in the system and the usage in accordance to the organizational structure also during post-implementation phase (Peng & Nunes, 2017). Problem: Despite the abundance of studies regarding the implementation of ERP systems there is a shortage of studies about the post-implementation phase, where existing post-implementation studies are rather fragmented around a large set of issues (Huang & Yasuda, 2016; Peng & Nunes, 2017). Furthermore, the studies about ERP usage during post-implementation tend to focus on user perspective or evaluation of system or organizational performance (Huang & Yasuda, 2016). Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how SMEs improve the usage of ERP systems during the post-implementation phase. Method: To fulfill the purpose of this study, the empirical data was collected through a multiple case study of three cases with SMEs of e-commerce retailer companies in Sweden. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with top management of the three SMEs in order to get understanding of underlying methods and reasons for the system usage improvement Conclusion: Findings of this study show that SMEs improve their system usage through enhancing knowledge-sharing and organizational learning as well as through unification of the procedures that is achieved through external support and knowledge-sharing.