¡yEnterprise Resource Planning¡z(ERP) is an integrated information system consists of different business functions including Financial/Cost, Sales/Distribution, Material Management, Production Planning, etc. It facilitates the business flexibility to adjust for environmental changes such as industries, customer needs, and the status of competitor. The purposes are to reduce the cost, enhance work efficiency, and generate sufficient information for the business decisions. Two enterprises are studied for their ERP implementation in this thesis; they are the InfoChamp Systems Corporation (ICSC) and the Yageo Company (YC). ICSC which started in 2000 A.D. is a spinout company of the China Steel Company after it successfully constructed the ERP system. The strategy of the China Steel Company was to gradually extend the application function from the original management information system. On the other hand, the Yageo Company adopts the SAP package and discards the whole traditional information system. In order to discover how these two enterprises implement the ERP systems, the author interviewed their representatives several times. Besides, the company documents, publish papers and data from their web sites were collected and analyzed. The main conclusions are summarized as the following. 1. The enterprise needs to carefully consider the organization structure associated with possible constraints before the implementation of ERP system. Whether to extend the traditional management information system or to adopt a certain industrial package, the information integration among new systems and old systems is a very complicated issue. 2. The goal of the implementation project should be clarified and specified to all members in the enterprise. In addition, the project manager should be fully authorized to take charge of the whole implementation process. 3. As the enterprise expend their business functions, the information system also needs extra modules. It is not an enduring decision to simply adopt an available package. However, using interface development to integrate the informational system will result in high maintenance cost. 4. The two enterprises emphasis the importance by establishing the project control mechanism. The executive managers serve as the project leader in order to proclaim the ambition of the project success. 5. The contract negotiation with the consulting company requires careful communication. The cost, durations, customization, and the commitment of a successful project should be included. 6. The consistency of the business and information process may enhance business performance. 7. The bureaucratic organization and workflow need a reformation.

The fact that we have entered turbulent times has been a central theme in the recent strategy literature. Turbulent environments are commonly described by increased competitive intensity, disruptive changes in the industry structure, volatility of demand, and unpredictability of customer behaviour, alongside instability of economic, social and political factors. In such a context, the adoption of traditional approaches to strategy, which assumes a relatively stable world, have been questioned by new approaches. Mixed strategy, which emerged as a contingency option to Porter's generic strategies model, defends that in a turbulent environment the simultaneous pursuit of the low-cost and differentiation approaches is fundamental for the short-term performance and long-term survival of the firm. A vast corpus of literature supports the benefits of adopting a mixed approach strategy: several empirical studies have proved that a combination of low-cost and differentiation strategic elements establishes a firm's performance superiority over the pure strategy choice. The mixed literature has concentrated on the performance linkage and on the debate countering the pure strategy approach, however very little attention has been paid to the challenges presented by the mixed strategy implementation. In fact, despite the rich empirical literature, it is still not clear how firms that adopt a mixed strategy may successfully integrate the inherent contradiction of the low-cost and differentiation approaches. The aim of this study is to investigate how a firm has been implementing the mixed strategy approach, unveiling its managerial characteristics and to generate a proposed managerial framework that could serve as a guide for further implementation. This study approaches the subject of mixed strategy implementation on three levels: environment, strategy definition and making process, and value chain activity. After having elucidated several ambiguities related to the concept of mixed strategy present in the literature and having proposed a normalized definition, this study investigates through a unique case study approach, an in-depth explorative process using causal process methods the managerial implication of the mixed strategy. Several characteristics are revealed from the unique case study and represent a major contribution to the field of strategy management. Furthermore, a managerial framework is proposed which could serve as support in the implementation of a mixed strategy.