Managerial framework for mediating the effect of organizational structure changes on effectiveness of ERP implementation : a case study of Canon Europa N.V.

(1)

1

University of Amsterdam

Executive Programme in Management Studies

Eduardas Sackis Student ID: 14411155

Master’s thesis

“Managerial framework for mediating the effect of organizational structure changes on effectiveness of ERP implementation. A case study of Canon Europa N.V.”

Date: 27th_{of January 2018}

(2)

2

Statement of Originality

This document is written by student Eduardas Sackis who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document. I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.

(3)

3

Abstract

This research studies factors that determine ERP system effectiveness and theorizes that high degrees of ‘organizational process knowledge’ is required in order to implement an effective ERP system. Theoretical links are made with reduction of such knowledge caused by

organizational structure changes, namely – acquisitions. The theory proposes that particular ‘ERP project team properties’ may outweigh such negative effects on ‘organizational process knowledge’ and suggests practical methods to instate such ‘ERP project team properties’ into the project organization. An exploratory positivist multiple case study comparing 3 projects within Canon Europa N.V verified the theoretical findings in a context of a finalized acquisition and found that more effective ERP solutions were implemented by cross-discipline teams that were efficient in communication, can learn and adapt quickly, had delegated decision-making power and made use of methods of continuous improvement, among others. Managerial implications are then proposed to allow firms build-up their organizational process knowledge, making any potential ERP implementations more effective and independent of organizational structure changes. Initiating continuous improvement programs as part of the daily business are proposed to achieve this. Furthermore, once ERP implementations are undertaken under the circumstances of insufficient organizational process knowledge – agile project management methodologies are found to deliver more effective ERP systems.

Introduction

Many large corporations nowadays rely on running their business operations and making business decisions based on transactional data recorded in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Enterprise resource planning systems are software solutions that integrate

(5)

5

business processes and functions in order to present a holistic view of the business in a single information system (Klaus and Gable, 2000). Such systems record the transactions that are performed in various departments (such as finance, logistics, procurement, and others), record resource usage and allow to coordinate business activities more effectively.

Despite the advantages and capabilities a modern ERP system provides, many companies that decide to run an ERP implementation project - struggle to do so within budget, timescales, and do not conclude the projects successfully (Scott and Vessey, 2002). Some of the main underlying reasons were analyzed by Aloini et al. (2007) and portrayed as being: risks related to wrong software selection, low top management involvement in the project, ineffective

communication, low key user involvement, high complexity of IT architecture, inadequate business process re-engineering, inadequate change management, inadequate IT supplier performance and other project management failures. Most academic research address ERP implementation analyses in the context of project risk management or gives prescriptive advice to rely on business process standardization across organizational units (Morton and Hu, 2008). Such line of thought does not incorporate the impact of business dynamics, such as

organizational structure changes, that might take place during an ERP implementation project, or after its conclusion; altering the overall landscape of business processes and their

interdependencies.

Acquisitions may introduce such organizational structure changes and changes in overall business process landscape. Some literature stresses the importance of post-acquisition

integration activities (Jemison & Sitkin, 1986; Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990; Dao et al., 2006), particularly human integration (Dao et al., 2016) aimed at reaching ‘common ground’ (Puranam et al., 2009) which entails shared values and knowledge among merging entities, which in turn

(6)

6

allows to achieve task integration (Dao et al., 2016) – all required to build an effective ERP solution.

This thesis aims at researching such acquisition-caused structural changes, their effect on the overall level of ‘organizational process knowledge’ and in turn - impact on implementing an effective ERP system; until the integration of an acquired unit is completed. On the other hand, since ERP projects are interdisciplinary (Aloini et al., 2007) – such ‘organizational process knowledge’ can be improved by incorporating elements of learning into the ‘ERP project team properties’, which may fulfil some of the human integration and task integration roles (Dao et al., 2016), and hence allowing to build a more effective ERP system.

This thesis contributes to the academic research by identifying a new mediating variable between ‘organizational structure changes’ and ‘ERP effectiveness’ which is ‘organizational process knowledge’. It may be undermined by organizational structure changes, consequently undermining ERP system effectiveness. An additional variable - ‘ERP project team properties’ – is identified which in parallel may foster ‘organizational process knowledge’ and support

implementations of effective ERP systems in doing so. Finally, this research aims at providing recommendations to companies at which properties should their ERP implementation teams possess, in order to improve the ‘organizational process knowledge’ and outweigh the negative effects of business dynamics, such as structure changes. This provides ERP implementation theory a new angle – shifting it purely from a set of project management frameworks into frameworks that address organizational learning and IT system evolution.

To summarize – this thesis aims to answer the question of ‘How do organizational structure changes influence ERP system effectiveness through organizational process knowledge and ERP project team properties?’. Furthermore, this thesis will conduct exploratory research in a selected

(7)

7

organization using a positivist multiple case study approach. The goal of this case study will be to identify issues introduced by acquisitions in a chosen firm – Canon Europa N.V. and their integration activities during an ERP system implementation. Furthermore, this research will provide advice to such organizations at how ERP implementations can be made less dependent from organizational structure changes.

Literature review

This literature review will be split into seven sections that build-up the theoretical model this thesis will analyze. The first section will introduce the reader with the concept of an Enterprise Resource Planning System and its importance to a modern enterprise. The second section will focus on the literature which defines ERP effectiveness, from which a proposal is made that ‘organizational process knowledge’ can help in designing an ERP system that meets an organization’s goals. The third section defines ‘organizational process knowledge’ and its links with ERP system effectiveness. The fourth section introduces literature on two conflicting views about ERP system implementations - in organizational structures that make use of standardized processes, such as administrational ones; in contrast to structures that rely on high levels of information sharing and interdependencies, which generate ‘organizational process knowledge’ through organizational liaison devices by allowing accumulating and exchanging organizational knowledge. The fifth section introduces a factor of business dynamics -

acquisitions - and their negative impact on organizational process knowledge at the time of an acquisition, and changes in levels of ‘organizational process knowledge’ throughout the process of integrating the merging organizations. A proposal is made that such acquisitions at the time of ERP implementation would negatively impact ERP effectiveness due to ‘organizational process knowledge’ gaps introduced by the acquisition. The sixth section proposes that certain ‘ERP

(8)

8

project team properties’ may have a positive impact on ‘organizational process knowledge’, if embedded into the project teams. The final, seventh section will introduce methods and concepts found in the literature aimed at instating such properties into organizations.

1) ERP systems and their role in a modern organization

Academic literature presents a number of definitions of an ERP system. According to Tsai et al. (2012) - an ERP system is an integrated information technology that uses common

databases and cross-functional information flow to allow organizations to integrate information from different departments and locations. Hoch and Dulebohn (2013) expand by describing ERP systems as “information systems (IS) that manage the business and consist of integrated software applications such as customer relations and supply chain management, manufacturing, finance and human resources”. Al-Mashari (2003) builds on this by saying that the “purpose of ERP is to integrate information across core functional areas in the organization to facilitate management and flow of information between the functions as well as between the organization and

stakeholders. They are the primary tool organizations use to manage their information”.

The benefits of having an integrated ERP solution are described by Elragal and Haddara (2012) – they state that ERP systems attempt to integrate data and processes in organizations, where the data is centrally stored in a single database. This allows ERP systems to provide businesses cost effective functionalities for building knowledge platforms through systematic acquisition, storage and dissemination of organizational knowledge (Shao et al., 2012). ERP systems are regarded as one of the most significant levers for organizations to derive competitive advantage (Hendricks et al., 2007; Purvis et al., 2001). An ERP system can be thought of as a business wide integration mechanism of all organizational information systems used to react to competitive pressures and market opportunities quickly, be more flexible in product

(9)

9

configurations, achieve reduced inventory and maintain tightened supply chain links (Bingi et al., 1999).

Yeh and Xu (2013) suggest that ERP projects should be aimed at fulfilling objectives of the departments comprising the organization; and the organization’s goals as a whole, hence ERP systems are closely related to organizational processes and organizational goals. Aladwani, (2001) and Davenport (1998) state that ERP systems, as integration software, represent a near complete re-architecting of an organization’s portfolio of transactions-processing applications in all functional areas. Such systems help different parts of the organization to share data and knowledge as well as reduce cost, so as to improve the management of business processes.

ERP implementation projects are often complex and very costly.The cost of ERP software can range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million dollars. Significant additional costs, sometimes amounting to higher costs than of the software itself, include costs of the consultants for ERP system selection, configuration and implementation, in addition to full-time human resources needed to work on the project (Al-Mashari, 2003).

The process of selecting a suitable ERP solution entails criteria such as ‘compatibility between the system and the business process’ (Baki and Çakar, 2005); also ‘flexibility in adjusting demands according to business requirements’ (Tsai et al., 2012), requiring an ERP implementation team to have good understanding of the organization’s requirements and processes that the ERP solution needs to support.

Latest developments in the ERP solutions offered by most known vendors, such as Oracle Corporation and SAP SE bring ERP solutions to the next level. In addition to ERP Cloud offerings, which eliminate the need of a client to own an expensive IT infrastructure - SAP SE

(10)

10

brought machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to their cloud solutions, which allow pooling data of a number of SAP’s customers for providing advanced analytics and market insights, while allowing customers to ‘train’ intelligent algorithms to automate work such as processing of customer payments to receivables, matching candidates to job openings, and raising productivity (SAP Leonardo project, SAP solution brief). Oracle Corporation is not staying behind by offering Big Data solutions to their customers (Oracle Big Data Solutions) as well.

2) ERP system effectiveness

Much of ERP project management literature has evolved around the factors of effectiveness of an ERP system. They can be identified as: information quality, system quality, information use, user satisfaction, individual impact and organizational impact (DeLone and McLean, 1992). Rahnavard and Bozorgkhou (2014) further propose that user friendliness, flexibility/adaptability, alignment with user needs, product quality, management of organizational change, ERP design principles and their alignment with the structure are important. In addition, AL-Mashari et al. (2003) states that the design of a new ERP system should cover all actions the old ERP system performs; while the newly chosen ERP platform should have high degrees of flexibility should it need to be adjusted. Lastly, Leonardi (2011) proposes that an ERP system implementation would be considered effective if the users perceive efficiency gains due to the implementation, and quick-wins of the implementation deliverables.

These factors can be used to measure the overall success of an ERP implementation project, as well as to measure the ERP fitness with the organizational requirements, which would define ERP effectiveness. Aloini et. al (2007) highlights that ERP projects are often interdisciplinary and affect interdependencies between business processes, the selected software solution, and the

(11)

11

business process re-engineering efforts needed in order to fit organizational processes into the capabilities of the selected software. Furthermore, they point out that complex ERP

implementations are often considered riskier than simple ones. They propose that managing ERP implementation risks is an iterative and continuous process that involves continuous context analysis and risk identification. This implies the need for building up knowledge of business processes within the organization. Based on such knowledge - gaps between the organizational processes and the ERP software capabilities can be identified and addressed to achieve a good fit between an ERP solution and the business requirements. Furthermore, much literature that analyzes ERP system effectiveness originate as project risk management frameworks and rarely mention the organizational dynamics that might affect a successful ERP implementation.

To conclude - ERP effectiveness may be identified by measuring the following factors identified above: high levels of user satisfaction (DeLone and McLean, 1992), high perceived alignment with user needs (Rahnavard and Bozorgkhou, 2014) across functional areas, high perceived level of efficiency gains introduced by the ERP implementation (Leonardi, 2011) - all would indicate good fitness between user needs and ERP solution design and would define high ERP effectiveness. Furthermore, higher perceived ERP flexibility (Rahnavard and Bozorgkhou, 2014) would indicate that an ERP solution if flexible to accommodate future process changes in the ERP solution design. Finally, short ERP implementation times (Leonardi, 2011; Bernroider & Koch, 2001) would indicate an ability to accommodate user needs into ERP solution design and low levels of perceived project risk. These factors will be incorporated into the questionnaire in order to study the level of ERP system effectiveness of the studied organization.

(12)

12

3) Organizational process knowledge

Previous section identified a number of factors that define an effective ERP system. These factors are mostly related to catering for the organization’s needs in the long term and being flexible once the business needs change.

However, in order for an ERP system to achieve these factors of effectiveness across the entire organization - it needs to cater for the needs of the system’s users across a number of functional areas that may have differing requirements. These functional areas of an organization, or departments, need to define which tasks will their employees perform in an ERP system in the chain of organization’s business activities, which information will enter the system, how will it be recorded, transformed, and how can the following department make use of this information while performing their tasks down the chain of activities.

This follows the arguments of Aloini et. al (2007) that ERP projects are interdisciplinary which affect interdependencies between business processes, as well as Al-Mashari (2003) identifying ERP systems as applications integrating information across core functional areas in the organization. This means that an organization must know its chain of tasks across

departments and how one activity in a department influences another activity in a following department.

This thesis will call such knowledge ‘organizational process knowledge’. Furthermore, a clearly defined set of policies, KPIs and terminology used across departments also fall into the same definition – they all would need to be captured in an ERP system in order to fulfill the requirements of an organization. However, such knowledge is not easy to capture - Scheer & Habermann (2000) suggest making use of business process modelling tools in order to visualize

(13)

13

these cross-activity relationships and align them through business process reengineering initiatives.

Finally, the more complex the organization’s structure is – the more difficult it is likely to be to capture ‘organizational process knowledge’, as the interrelationships between departments, their activities and information flow may not be easy to define and streamline. Capturing

‘organizational process knowledge’ in such an environment will require more interaction between departments in order to discuss their activities, policies, KPIs and their impact on each other on a more frequent basis. This thesis compares such interaction to ‘liaison devices’ (Mintzberg, 1979) discussed in the next section. Some organizations already possess such interaction devices built-in to their organizational structure due to the dynamic nature of their business. ERP implementation projects may leverage this knowledge and design systems based on this knowledge to cater for complex requirements. To the contrary - other organizations that do not have such interaction devices may choose to perform only administrative tasks in an ERP system, as these tasks are already clearly defined and dictated by well-known unified policies and procedures across the entire enterprise; making the existence of liaison devices and

organizational process knowledge less important factors in order to achieve ERP effectiveness.

4) Organizational structure & ERP effectiveness

Morton and Hu (2008) theorized that in traditional M-form organizations - highly de-centralized and independent business units have a low likelihood of ERP success. Their reasoning is based on the conclusion that the organization would incur significant efforts in standardizing business processes across its units, where different business practices may have evolved, prior to an ERP implementation. Hence, they propose to implement ERP systems only

(14)

14

in mechanistic, highly standardized organizational functions across business units. They propose that these will most likely be administrational functions across such de-centralized units.

Implicitly – this suggests that only in such functions the organization as a whole would be fully informed of the business processes across the units and would incur minimal effort in deploying an ERP system.

To the contrary, Mintzberg (1979) suggests that organizational units that operate in information and knowledge rich environments, resulting from high environmental dynamism, evolve into organizational forms where there is little standardization of economic activity directed by the HQ, requiring autonomous decision making by the units independently of the HQ. In such cases - these units appeared to have adapted to use more liaison devices across the units to coordinate overall economic activity and its interdependencies. These liaison devices (cross-functional project teams aimed at exchanging knowledge, for example (Mintzberg, 1979)) that connect business units - seemed to be in possession of highest degrees of organizational process knowledge. Higher levels of de-centralization coexisted with higher necessity to leverage information availability through these liaison devices in order to enable well-informed decision making within and across the business units.

Stoelhorst and Strikwerda (2009) depict evidence of embodying even a much stricter case of liaison devices that store organizational process knowledge in firms that operate in information intensive businesses. They analyze cases of forced cooperation between business units, achieved through intentionally designing overlapping organizational dimensions that are dependent on each other to carry out their activity and share limited resources. Such organizations make use of the enterprise-wide availability of information in one single ledger, eliminate transfer pricing among units and make resource usage across units fully transparent while forcing negotiation

(15)

15

and collaboration among them. According to Stoelhorst and Strikwerda (2009) - enterprise-wide information availability enables achieving knowledge synergies across business units and freeing individual knowledge from within business units. It also incentivizes efficient resource use, willingness to collaborate and help each other in realizing market opportunities to benefit the organization as a whole. Such an approach does not rely on business activity standardization across units and supports the concept of “resource pooling” instead. In such a multidimensional organization - standardization of knowledge would have to be a method of coordination across units (Chandler, 1991), enabling strategic and informed decision making that might positively impact other business units.

This section has identified two conflicting approaches towards ERP implementations

(Morton and Hu, 2008; Stoelhorst and Strikwerda, 2009). In the conclusion of first section in this literature review – it was identified that enterprise-wide ERP system implementations are

interdisciplinary (Aloini et al., 2007) and the third section theorized that key success factors of an ERP system have a higher chance to be met if high degrees of ‘organizational process knowledge’ across the enterprise is present. This section adds the elements of capturing knowledge and sharing it through mechanisms built into the organizational structure, or ERP implementation project structure. It can be said that such informational unit interdependencies - by having them built into the organizational structure - may lead to implementing a more effective ERP system to achieve the full potential capabilities of a modern ERP platform.

5) Acquisitions and the effect on organizational process knowledge

Large organizations often grow through acquisitions which alter the overall landscape of organizational structure and processes. In a case of a merger or an acquisition, business processes across units will be changed as newly acquired units would have to be integrated into the existing

(16)

16

organizational structure. Haspeslagh and Jemison (1991) describe the factors determining the level of integration of an acquired entity as ‘the need to absorb the acquired entity’ – which may be high in cases where strategic interdependence among units is high; or low when the need to preserve the organizational autonomy of the acquired unit is important. The level of such need depends on the: need to share resources at operational level, transfer skills across functions (including managerial skills) and combine resources to achieve synergy benefits. These factors imply that acquisitions result in the need of exchanging skills and resources, and prior to such exchange – both parts of the organization will find themselves in a situation where they lack knowledge of the organizational processes of their counterpart prior to integration taking place.

Furthermore, Jemison & Sitkin (1986) highlight that much of acquisition literature focused only on strategic fit, omitting the importance of organizational fit and post-merger integration. The latter identified how two firms can be integrated with respect to daily operations post acquisition. According to them – organizational fit should become an additional factor for decision making in the acquisition process. They suggest that acquiring firms often perform strategic analyses of potential acquisition targets and leave out the post-acquisition integration topics, making acquisitions a discontinuous process. Organizational fit brings variables such as match between administrative practices, cultural practices, and personnel characteristics, positively impacting the feasibility and costs of integrating the target. They suggest that

acquisitions often face escalating momentum (pressures to complete acquisition process quickly) which result in less consideration for integration issues at the time of acquisition. Jemison & Sitkin (1986) implicitly state that organizational mismatch between merging parties at the time of acquisition may result in reduced level of overall organizational process knowledge at the time

(17)

17

of acquisition. Part of such post-acquisition integration may be a process of integrating an acquired entity into the ERP system landscape of the acquiring firm.

Dao et al. (2016) emphasizes that shared knowledge and shared beliefs between acquirer and the target can trigger a self-coordination mechanism among employees, supporting ‘human integration’ among merging parties which supports aligning structures, tasks and systems of the involved organizations while entailing mutual learning (March, 1991). Puranam et al. (2009) uses a definition of ‘common ground’ - existing, overlapping, shared knowledge among units - as prerequisite for ‘human integration’, which is required for successful ‘task integration’

(Birkinshaw et al., 2000; Epstein, 2004; Schweiger & Goulet, 2005); emphasizing the need of post-merger coordination of shared knowledge. Dao et al.’s (2016) work revealed that task integration of accounting, financial and IT systems was a major focus of the managers in the entities they analyzed. Such task integration is also illustrated by Puhakka (2017) where a process of post-acquisition absorption (Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990) resulted in the need to change accounting practices in an acquired entity’s accounting methods in order to standardize accounting principles among group companies, which resulted in large write-offs and losses in the acquired entity. This thesis, using the notion of Aloini et al. (2007) hypothesizes that the resulting organizational processes reflecting ‘task integration’ (Dao et al. 2016) would need to be embodied in an effective ERP system.

This section presented the arguments supporting the notion that acquisitions will introduce organizational structure changes and will result in the need to integrate acquired entities in a form of task and human integration (Dao et al. 2016) to reach a ‘common ground’ (Puranam et al., 2009) by using coordination and knowledge sharing in order to reach a level of mutual understanding about the merging entities’ inner workings. Clark defines ‘common ground’

(18)

18

between two entities as “the sum of their mutual, common or joint knowledge, beliefs and suppositions” (Clark 1996, p. 93). Puranam summarized that the concept of common ground is closely related to the economic concept of common knowledge (Becker and Murphy, 1992). Such common ground relates to the ‘organizational process knowledge’, defined in section 3 as “knowledge about the chain of tasks across departments and how one activity in a department influences another activity in a following department”. Since a newly acquired entity will bring additional departments into the organizational landscape – organizational process knowledge is likely to be negatively affected by such an acquisition until the integration of the acquired entities is fully completed.Such a negative effect on ‘organizational process knowledge’, through the lack of knowledge about the internal processes of an acquired entity will, in effect, reduce the potential ERP effectiveness during its implementation across merging entities. A prerequisite for task integration is high levels of human integration, as sufficient levels of shared knowledge between both merging parties are required to reach ‘common ground’ (Puranam et al., 2009).

To conclude, the effects of acquisitions and organizational structure changes on

‘organizational process knowledge’ can be determined by considering the following factors: In cases of post-acquisition absorption (Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990) – it is likely that the overall organizational structure and routine landscape would change (Puhakka, 2017) in the merging entities at the time of integration. Such absorption would increase the levels of unit interdependency in decision making and information availability across (merged) units (Stoelhorst and Strikwerda, 2009; Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990). Similarly, high levels of resource pooling and decision-making interdependency (Yoon, 2009; Reypens et al., 2016; Potts & Hartley, 2015) would indicate presence of more ‘organizational process knowledge’ as the

(19)

19

merging units had undergone the learning process about each other. On the contrary, low levels of integration (Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990) post-acquisition resulting in operational

autonomy of an acquired entity could suggest ‘organizational process knowledge’. Finally, the integration efforts of two merging entities are suggested to be lower if organizational fit between the two entities in terms of administrative practices, cultural practices and personnel

characteristics is higher (Jemison and Sitkin, 1986). These factors will be incorporated into the questionnaire in order to identify variations in the organizational structures and their effects in the chosen organization.

6) Organizational process knowledge and ERP implementation team properties

Some literature stresses the importance of the following factors in order to achieve effective ERP systems: clear definition of the strategic goals of the company and how the IT system can help achieving them, top management support, commitment and good quality user training (Haft and Umble, 2003). A good understanding of overall organization’s business processes and inner workings are essential in order to fulfill the ERP effectiveness goals listed in section 2. This section will discuss how good levels of organizational process knowledge can originate in an ERP implementation team, allowing that knowledge to be built-in to the ERP application.

Certain ERP project team properties and behaviors, if embedded properly into the

implementation project - may compensate for a lack of organizational process knowledge, help uncovering ostensive element of business practices (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), align business practices across units to achieve better human and task integration (Dao et al., 2016), and design an ERP platform that fulfills the criteria of an effective ERP system. This proposal is backed up by notions found in the academic literature: Nah et al. (2001) stated that cross-functional teams that are capable of making decisions and executing changes are crucial to ERP implementation

(20)

20

success. Rothenberger and Srite (2000) stressed further that implementation teams possessing the right properties were a key success factor to ERP implementations. Hoch and Dulebohn (2013) stated that high degrees of coordination, knowledge sharing and communication are needed within ERP implementation teams and between them.

Ross (1998) argued that organizational knowledge is key to the acceptance or rejection of the assumptions about business processes built into an IT system in the early stages of the

implementation process, suggesting that early involvement of users is useful to design a good IT system and reduce the amount of customization needed to the software, directly associated with increased costs and complexity. Similarly, Somers & Nelson (2004) suggest that business process reengineering (BPR) prior to implementation, aiming at achieving acceptable level of business process standardization, plays a particularly crucial role in the early stages of

implementation, meaning that an ERP implementation project would have to take BPR activities as a pre-requisite to an ERP implementation. Business process re-engineering capabilities of an ERP implementation team refer to a set of techniques, which integrate, build, and reconfigure an organization’s business processes (Niehaves and Henser, 2011). BPR is a knowledge intensive activity, dependent on organizational learning capabilities which can be built into an ERP implementation project taskforce. However, according to Niehaves and Henser (2011), an ERP implementation team may face difficulties in business process change and ERP implementation tasks if insufficient documentation or knowledge about the overall business process context is available. Hence, it is important that an ERP project team should be able to produce

‘organizational process knowledge’ across business entities and capture it, if it is not available beforehand. Relating this to the previous section of this review – this becomes especially

(21)

21

relevant if there is a possibility of overall ‘organizational process knowledge’ being undermined by a recent acquisition.

According to Leonardi (2011) routines/processes change much more often to overcome constraints imposed by the technology than the other way around. He discusses a tradeoff that an organization needs to make between bridging the system limitations through adjusting business processes, and expanding the features of the technology instead of changing business processes, which is a costly activity. Leonardi (2011) suggests that in case latter is chosen - system

adaptivity can be increased by having in-house developers, IT staff and consultants in the implementation team. Furthermore, the subjects of his study displayed properties of co-creation embedded into the project team in order to carry-out the business process adjustments, based upon which supporting IT systems were built. They made use of focus groups of users that performed testing, where suggestions for improvements were collected. Also, another focus group was established to create and update standard work procedures by making use of subject matter experts and their knowledge. This lead to quick-wins, as processes were made more efficient through a new standardized approach. The resulting standardized model was built into the software and created gains in speed of executing tasks, which was the key requirement of the department; despite some loss of process flexibility. Another quick win of standardizing

processes achieved through such co-creation - was the possibility to analyze data across the organization, as one single set of definitions was used across units. This encouraged

collaboration, increased the frequency of interaction among team members; allowing continuous improvement of product designs iteratively.

Furthermore, Bernroider and Koch (2001) discussed the benefits of short implementation times of ERP systems, aimed at generating quick wins and efficiency gains (Leonardi, 2011);

(22)

22

allowing an easier buy-in of change recipients (Kotter, 1999). A quick ERP implementation may indicate good organizational process knowledge of the ERP implementation team, meaning that the ERP system design caters for user needs and can be implemented swiftly.

Christin Jurisch et al. (2014) point out a number of possible alternative approaches to a conventional ‘revolutionary’ Business Process Reengineering approach – they discuss

‘evolutionary’ approaches such as Total Quality Management - spanning across all departments and functions (Bucher and Winter, 2007; Koch, 2011); or continuous process improvement methods, such as Six Sigma (Sidorova and Isik, 2010), which are focused on designing, improving and monitoring business processes continuously. This implies that an ERP

implementation does not necessarily have to have an end date and can be approached iteratively, especially in a situation where organizational process knowledge needs to be built-up. An ERP implementation team can make use of evolutionary approaches to change; going hand-in-hand with suggestions of Zollo and Singh (2004) to approach business process improvement in a continuous manner.

The iterative improvement approach is opposite to a linear ERP implementation framework proposed by Rajagopal (2002) consisting of initiation, adoption, adaptation, acceptance,

routinization, and infusion stages. ERP implementations are often seen as having a clear end date - Somers and Nelson (2001) point out that a project team usually disbands after installation of the software solution. A suggestion can be made that in organizations with insufficient process knowledge – an evolutionary approach towards ERP implementation should be taken in order to incorporate an element of flexibility in designing the IT system. Ideally, an ERP implementation team should include a continuous improvement panel of members from across different business units aimed at analyzing and streamlining business processes across the organization, creating

(23)

23

policies, looking for best practices and incorporating them incrementally into the ERP system to cater for the changes in an evolutionary way. Furthermore, such an ERP implementation team can absorb the additional changes to the system required to incorporate new business entities into the system landscape as part of the post-acquisition integration process. Such a need for

flexibility can be ensured by creating in-house IT capabilities which allows adjustments to be made to the system in quicker fashion, creating a need for ERP implementation teams to have IT development capabilities within them (Fitzgerald & O’Kane (1999); M. Sumner (1999)). Somers & Nelson (2004) adds that vendors’ tools and their collaboration with the ERP implementation team can significantly reduce the cost and time of deploying ERP systems, through helping them to understand the capabilities of the software, best practices in other organizations, how the required business processes can be built into the system that is being implemented.

To summarize the abovementioned approaches of embedding organizational process knowledge into the ERP implementation team – we could state that high levels of business process re-engineering prior to the ERP implementation in order to fit it into ERP design

(Puhakka, 2017; Somers & Nelson, 2004; Niehaves and Henser, 2011) indicate team’s efforts in studying the organizations and preparing them for an implementation of a new ERP system, indicating an ability to generate ‘organizational process knowledge’. If the ERP implementation team has good ‘knowledge of organizational processes’ - then the business process change (Niehaves and Henser, 2011) across merging entities is likely to be more successful, indicating high levels of ‘common ground’ among them (Puranam et al, 2009). Evolutionary BPR activities allow ERP project implementation teams to capture more ‘organizational process knowledge’ over time across business functions and implement it incrementally into an ERP landscape (Puhakka, 2017; Somers & Nelson, 2004; Niehaves and Henser, 2011). In-house IT capabilities

(24)

24

(Fitzgerald & O’Kane, 1999; Sumner, 1999) allow quick modifications to the system to be done, increasing system’s flexibility and reducing a possibility of omitting pieces of ‘organizational process knowledge’ from being omitted in the IT solution design. High degrees of business routine documentation produced (Morton and Hu, 2008) would indicate a higher degree of ‘organizational process knowledge’ within ERP project implementation teams and an ability to guide the users in the future system through training materials (Haft and Umble, 2003). Finally, an ERP implementation team will be making effective decisions and execute them effectively (Nah et al., 2001), if they possess good organizational process knowledge. These factors will be incorporated into the questionnaire in order to identify one or more of these properties being embedded into the ERP implementation team in a chosen organization in order to increase levels of organizational process knowledge.

7) Methods of fostering organizational process knowledge in ERP project implementation teams

Project management literature discusses team constructs that establish tight collaboration in environments with high uncertainty in product development. These factors and tools aim at instating ways of working that facilitate organizational learning, cross-functional collaboration which may foster the accumulation of organizational process knowledge by the ERP

implementation team.

In order to see how levels of organizational process knowledge can be improved within an ERP implementation team, we can turn to agile project management methodologies, or SCRUM (Schwaber, 1997). These co-creation methods make use of bringing knowledge from across different functional areas into small teams that make use of retrospectives/reviews after each iteration of deliverables (Schwaber ,1997) to look for opportunities to improve. They also rely on

(25)

25

short delivery timelines of a functional product that is incrementally improved after each short iteration. These notions are similar to the conclusions on ERP project team properties discussed in the previous section.

Similarly, Crittenden & Crittenden (2008) suggests that fostering cross-functional team integration and collaboration across the company allows to avoid creating knowledge ‘silos’. That is reinforced by Robinson and Dilts (1999) suggesting that interdepartmental cooperation is of crucial importance during ERP implementation as such systems cross the functional and departmental boundaries, hence cooperation and involvement of all people involved is essential.

According to Shao et al. (2012) - knowledge sharing across disciplines has been considered as a significant factor in driving ERP success. ERP systems usually span across organizational boundaries and systematic acquisition, storage and dissemination of organizational knowledge is crucial in building intensive knowledge platform (Henricks et al., 2007; Purvis et al., 2001). Cooperative social contexts that facilitate creation, coordination and integration of knowledge distributed among employees, business units and partners – need to overcome cultural barriers and initiate appropriate culture to best facilitate knowledge sharing (Jones, 2005; Jones et al., 2006).

Furthermore, Potts & Hartley (2015) point out other benefits of establishing mechanisms for information/knowledge sharing within an organization under conditions of high business uncertainty. They regard such routines as a sign of a social economy which produces innovation, while Reypens et al. (2016) provides evidence that in knowledge intensive environments - pooling data allows gaining new insights and describing characteristics in a more systematic fashion.

(26)

26

Bartlett and Ghoshal (1993) point out that horizontal knowledge and capability integration across organizational units should be the role of middle management. This would imply, that if an organization would like to better understand the inner workings of business units prior, or during an ERP implementation – they should turn to the middle managers of those units for help, as they are best informed of the daily challenges of their business and departments. This renders them to be good candidates for participating in defining the properties of ERP system design bottom-up during the analysis phase of the project as key users (Aloini et al., 2007). Such teams should include the middle management of an acquired entity as well.

Furthermore, Puhakka (2017) states that usage of participation methods in the companies they analyzed - a platform where the acquired entity had a chance to raise issues at an early stage towards the senior management of the acquiring organization - was received very positively by the acquired entity. Furthermore, the knowledge leakage through loss of staff of the acquired entity was prevented.

Finally, collaboration cross teams and functions has additional behavioral benefits. Yoon (2009) identifies that cross-team collaboration in his study resulted in “organizational citizenship behavior”. That is behavior that is not expected to be carried out by an individual within his role, but is carried out by one in order to help an organization (similarly to organizational altruism). Such organizational context is important to be able to generate and capture organizational knowledge, such as best practices and process designs. In addition to this, Stoelhorst and Strikwerda’s (2009) field research shows evidence of organizational citizenship behavior

resulting within functions with forced dependencies and collaboration. They showed evidence of ERP systems designed to share and report information across different organizational dimensions while allowing one unit to suggest customers to another, if the former unit cannot cater for their

(27)

27

requirements. This encourages different organizational units to act in the best interest of an organization as a whole in everyday business, collaborate closely and report the marginal contribution of transactions across different organizational dimensions.

To summarize these factors – we can say that high levels of inter-functional cooperation in the ERP implementation team as a project organization (Crittenden & Crittenden, 2008) will allow to discover knowledge trapped in functional ‘silos’ (Crittenden & Crittenden, 2008) and make effective use of collaborative ‘liaison devices’. This can be achieved by making use of participatory methods, such as user-panels consisting of middle managers of the departments of the target organizations for the ERP implementation; and cross-discipline project teams as agile project management methods propose. The resulting high levels of altruism in knowledge sharing (Yoon, 2009) would indicate a higher degree of collaboration across teams, allowing to capture more ‘organizational process knowledge’. This is an attitude and behavior that is to be fostered in the ERP implementation team. Furthermore, good cross-functional collaboration may result in low perceived complexity of ERP implementation (Aloini et al., 2007) among the team members as they are more likely to able to make use of knowledge from different parts of the organization and codify it into the future IT system and business process design more effectively. These factors will be incorporated into the questionnaire in order to identify one or more of these properties being embedded into the ERP implementation team in a chosen organization in order to increase levels of organizational process knowledge.

This section proposed a number of methods which allow organizational process knowledge to be improved by incorporating elements learning and information sharing in an ERP project team, which may arguably increase the chances of implementing an effective ERP system by

(28)

28

fulfilling some of the human and task integration activities (Dao et al., 2016) discussed in section 5, while delivering additional behavioral and contextual benefits, as literature suggests.

8) Theoretical framework

From the literature above - it was identified that organizational process knowledge and ERP implementation project team properties mediate the ERP system effectiveness if a firm is involved in acquisitions.

Section 2 of the literature review identified the factors of an effective ERP system. Section 3 identifies that ‘organizational process knowledge’ is required in order to achieve these factors of ERP effectiveness. Section 4 of the literature review identified that some

organizational structures embed ‘organizational process knowledge’ into them by making use of ‘liaison devices’ (Mintzberg, 1979) to exchange information across its units.

Section 5 of the literature review revealed that acquisitions of business entities will alter the organizational structure and introduce new organizational processes into the enterprise. The newly formed organization will choose the level of integration needed between the units

(Haspeslagh and Jemison, 1991) which will determine the course of post-acquisition integration. Furthermore, Dao et al. (2016) states that human integration among merging parties is required to achieve task integration among parties, which is a learning process (Zaheer et al., 2013) in order to achieve ‘common ground’ of shared beliefs and knowledge (Puranam et al., 2009). Arguably - such integration mechanisms and ‘common ground’ among merging entities are similar to Mitzberg’s (1979) liaison devices needed to generate overall organizational process knowledge, which is a pre-requisite in achieving the properties of a successful ERP

(29)

29

Section 6 of the literature review builds on the connections established in section 5 – particularly at the fact that ERP implementation teams may be designed in such a way to become a liaison device itself (Mintzberg, 1979), covering human and task integration of the merging units (Dao et al., 2016) and the units that will undergo ERP implementation; which would enable generating ‘organizational process knowledge’. Based on conclusions drawn in section 5 - this thesis argues that in cases where the acquired business units have little organizational fitness with the acquirer (Jemison and Sitkin, 1986) and little ‘common ground’ (Puranam et al., 2009), - poor levels of overall organizational process knowledge would result; and building-in liaison elements and learning capabilities into the ERP implementation team could diminish the negative effects brought by organizational structure changes towards organizational process knowledge.

Section 7 of the literature review discusses the methods by which the ERP

implementation teams can be enabled to accumulate ‘organizational process knowledge’ and trigger the ERP implementation team properties depicted in section 6.

The linkages described in the literature and in the above summary of the literature review are graphically portrayed in Figure 1, identifying two new mediating variables between

organizational structure changes and ERP effectiveness. The first one is ‘organizational process knowledge’, which may be undermined by organizational structure changes, further undermining ERP system effectiveness. The second one is - ‘ERP project team properties’ – which in parallel may support ‘organizational process knowledge’ and implementations of effective ERP systems. The resulting model depicts the following line of thought: firms that engage in acquisitions undergo organizational structure changes as new business entities are acquired. As these new entities with unknown ways of working on the operational/departmental level enter the organizational landscape – it is suggested that the overall level of organizational process

(30)

30

knowledge decreases, until these entities are integrated into seamless operations. If the overall organizational landscape is undergoing ERP implementation efforts prior to such integration taking place – then it is suggested that the effectiveness of such ERP implementation may not be as high as expected. However, this thesis proposes that specific ERP project team properties may decrease this negative effect, if embedded into the ERP project team, making the effectiveness of ERP implementation projects less influenced by organizational structure changes, such as

acquisitions.

Figure 1: Influence of organizational structure changes on ERP system effectiveness through organizational process knowledge and ERP project team properties

The summaries of each section of the literature review identified the factors that would allow links of this theoretical model to measured and identified in a chosen business entity. These factors are put together in Table 1 and are grouped into themes:

Themes

Codes

ERP effectiveness

1. User satisfaction with ERP - DeLone and McLean (1992)

2. User perception on ERP flexibility - (Rahnavard and Bozorgkhou, 2014)

3. Alignment with user needs - Rahnavard and Bozorgkhou, 2014 Organizational process knowledge Acquisitions Organizational structure changes ERP effectiveness − ERP project team properties +

(31)

31

4. Level of quick wins and efficiency gains of the ERP implementation (Leonardi, 2011)

5. Length of ERP implementation (Leonardi, 2011; Bernroider & Koch, 2001).

Acquisitions and effect on organizational structure changes

6. What is the level of integration post acquisition? (Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990)

7. Variation in organizational structures and routines as a result of acquisitions (Puhakka, 2017)

8. What is the level of organizational fit between merging entities in terms of administrative practices, cultural practices and personnel characteristics? (Jemison and Sitkin, 1986).

9. Inter-dimensional information availability and unit interdependency (Stoelhorst and Strikwerda, 2009)

10. Level of resource pooling and decision-making interdependency (Yoon, 2009; Reypens et al., 2016; Potts & Hartley, 2015)

Organizational process knowledge

11. Level of business process re-engineering prior to the ERP implementation to fit into ERP design (Puhakka, 2017; Somers & Nelson, 2004; Niehaves and Henser, 2011)

12. Is business process reengineering evolutionary or end-dated? (Puhakka, 2017; Somers & Nelson, 2004; Niehaves and Henser, 2011) 13. Level of routine documentation (Morton and Hu, 2008; Haft and Umble, 2003)

14. Key user involvement in solution design (Aloini et al., 2007) 15.Perceived quality of user training (Haft and Umble, 2003) 16. Level of common ground in process knowledge among entities (Puranam et al, 2009).

17. Perceived knowledge generation in project team (Schwaber, 1997; Crittenden & Crittenden, 2008).

18. Perceived complexity of IT project- Aloini et al. (2007)

19. ERP vendor contribution to the success of ERP implementation (Somers & Nelson, 2004)

20. In-house IT capabilities (Fitzgerald & O’Kane, 1999; Summer, 1999) allowing flexibility of system design

(32)

32

21. Perceived level of decision making effectiveness and their execution (Nah et al., 2001)

22. Level of inter-functional cooperation in the project organization (Crittenden & Crittenden, 2008)

ERP project team properties and

behavioral enablers

23. Level of altruism in knowledge sharing (Yoon, 2009)

25. What is the level of human and task integration across business units does the team achieve? (Dao et al., 2016)

Table 1: Summarizing factors of research that depict linkages of the theoretical model/themes

Research methods:

An exploratory positivist multiple case study of three projects within Canon Europa N.V. will be used in this qualitative research. This particular organization was chosen because the author of the research has worked at Canon Europa N.V. for the last 6 years and was part of its extensive efforts of acquiring another entity - Oce Technologies - and integrating the operations of both. While this was happening, Canon Europa N.V. began a large-scale roll-out of a new IT Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to allow cross functional flow of information across operations of different departments (Tsai et al., 2012) and to derive competitive advantage (Hendricks et al., 2007). The project ran into significant delays and unexpected issues as integrating operations of both companies into one IT system required high degrees of task integration (Dao et al., 2016) across functions of both entities, whereas both entities were left largely left operating autonomously (Hasperslagh and Jemison, 1990) after acquisition and prior to the implementation of a new ERP system. However, other projects Canon Europa N.V. initiated within the same context were running with much higher success rates in implementing parts of the ERP systems under the same circumstances.

(33)

33

This research will firstly introduce the context of Canon Europa N.V. and its organizational structure prior to the acquisition. Then it will elaborate how the acquisition altered it and the organizational process knowledge prior to the ERP implementation. Then the research will identify how organizational process knowledge was impacted by ERP implementation team properties across the three projects; and how the end users of the ERP systems perceived their effectiveness after the implementation. In order to evaluate the linkages established in the theoretical model and find out which emergent themes appear from responses – three particular ERP implementation initiatives were chosen in order to triangulate the data. The reason for choosing these projects is an underlying difference between how they were structured – they made use of different project management methodologies (various degrees of agility), resulting in different ERP project team properties embedded in the projects’ way of working. The fact that all three projects operated in the same organizational context and often involved the same project team members, while affecting the same end users across the three projects – makes the

comparison more objective. The inferential logic of the method of difference will be used across these three projects called “Unity” (linear project management method), “OneSource” (agile project management method) and “Hyperion” (adapted agile project management method).

The theoretical model and its elaborate phenomena determined in the literature review gave a starting point for deriving themes and axial coding for data gathering and further thematic analysis. Table 1 portrays how this was structured. The pre-defined themes and codes have been translated into a questionnaire (see appendix 1), and the answers provided by the interviewees were analyzed by reading through interview transcripts and noting the patterns for analysis and comparison. A provision was provided for any emergent themes, also un-anticipated intervening conditions and interactions of agents with the phenomena analyzed. The chosen approach is to

(34)

34

combine a deductive a priori template of codes that formed a template based on research

question (Crabtree and Miller, 1999) and a data-driven inductive approach of Boyatzis (1998) as Fereday and Muir-Cochrane described (2006).

The chosen way of gathering data is conducting semi-structured interviews with the project teams and end users, as the context and the experiences of the respondents are of high relevance to this research, even though the pre-determined questions may make the process more obtrusive. Nonetheless, interviews allow to incorporate an element of surprise into the findings, as the respondents can provide more meaning to their answers by explaining their reasoning, making the research have more confidence through reflexivity.

The questionnaires were designed as follows: themes were derived using the theoretical model in order to group the questions together. The questions were designed around the elaborated factors of the literature review that were converted into axial codes around each theme. Questions related to themes of ‘ERP effectiveness’ and ‘Acquisitions and effect on organizational structure changes’ were aimed at the end users of the three ERP system

implementation initiatives - as they are the group that is affected by both to the largest extent. Questions related to ‘organizational process knowledge’ were asked to both the end users and the ERP project teams as both groups may experience the factors related to this theme. Questions related to the theme ‘ERP implementation team properties’ were asked to the ERP project team itself. The split among these focus groups is shown in Appendix 3. This split, however, was not followed strictly and if a code was identified in a response of a respondent from a different focus group – it was still included in the analysis.

In order to ensure data validity and generalizability – units of analysis were chosen from Canon entities that have undergone implementations of all three projects in different countries –

(35)

35

Netherlands, Belgium/Luxembourg and Germany. This allows to triangulate the data across projects within the same set of units of analysis. A unit of analysis must have been involved in at least two differently structured projects (which are able to display different ERP project team properties) to qualify for a selected sample of interviewees, in order to be able to compare the experience of units of analysis across these projects. In total, 10 interviewees among along these categories, across 3 different countries have been identified as suitable units of analysis. The depiction of these criteria is situated in Table 2.

The analysis of data was performed through plotting the responses to the codes identified in the theoretical model, and potentially finding new emergent themes – aimed at confirming or denying the relationships depicted in the axial coding, and to inductively identify any new codes or themes. The aim was to test the influence of ‘organizational structure changes’ on

‘organizational process knowledge’ and on ‘ERP effectiveness’; while finding whether, and which ‘ERP project team properties’ can improve such knowledge. Furthermore, for

simplification purposes – the codified interview transcripts have been assigned low/medium/high score across every code to display the trends and linkages of the theoretical model numerically. The data was analyzed iteratively and qualitative inquiry was used to question the previous analytical stage before moving to the next one (Tobin and Begley, 2004). Such process review phases took place after each interview.

There are limitations to this interpretative approach towards the axial coding along a pre-defined codebook, as the author may unconsciously seek confirmation of data he expects to find (Crabtree and Miller, 1999, p. 170). The data needs to be ‘corroborated’ (Crabtree and Miller, 1999) through several iterations of analysis across respondents with different backgrounds, as depicted in Table 2.

(36)

36

The research findings are generalizable as literature shows that many companies in the industry face difficulties in similar IT system implementations. Companies that fit into a similar context may make use of the findings making the research more relevant.

Interviewee Unity project (waterfall method) OneSource project (fully agile method) Hyperion project (adapted agile method) ERP implementation

team? End user?

C x x x D x x x E x x x F (DE) x x x J (DE) x x x A (BE) x x x G (NL) x x x B (NL) x x x H (NL) x x x I (NL) x x x

Table 2: Interviewees and their involvement in projects researched

This research will then draw practical implications on how firms can approach a large-scale ERP implementation in a more sustainable fashion, increasing the flexibility of an ERP system and making it more independent from the organizational structure changes.

Results - Case Study of Canon Europa N.V.:

1) Organizational structure prior to acquisition of Oce Technologies

Canon Europa N.V. is the operational headquarters of the Canon group operating in the EMEA market. In their office in Amstelveen, the Netherlands – the central operations of legal, HR, IT, finance, supply chain and (green) procurement reside. Canon Europa N.V among other functions also fulfills the task of distributing the products, received from the manufacturers,

(37)

37

across the EMEA region to the sales companies in respective countries; also ensuring equal treatment of the sales companies in terms of standards of quality, transfer pricing and legal compliancy in the change of ownership of goods from the central organization to the national sales companies. The national sales companies (NSOs) are then responsible for selling the goods in their market and reaching their financial targets.

Canon Europa N.V. also sets the pan-European policies and standards, such as accounting guidelines and standards to which the sales companies across EMEA need to comply while submitting their actual financial results to Canon Europa N.V., which in turn ensures that data integrity is validated, and then submits them to the parent company Canon Inc. in a timely and accurate manner. Similar standards are set for how budgeting cycles of original budget, revised budget and actuals are being set together with the central organization, compiled and reported across EMEA. As a result – many operating principles across Canon companies are standardized to a large extent, leaving some operational autonomy to the sales companies as long as the corporate guidelines and standards are complied with.

2) Acquisition of Oce Technologies and organizational structure changes

In 2009 Canon group announced an acquisition of a Dutch copier and printer maker Oce Technologies (Canon News Release, November 16th_{, 2009) which strengthened the product and} service mix Canon group could offer especially in the high-end product market; in addition to R&D synergies and expanding the portfolio of customers across market segments.

In 2011 – Oce Technologies and Canon sales companies started merging their office locations (Canon Press release, 10th_{of June, 2011), workforce and operations, a pilot country}

(38)

38

(sales organization) being Switzerland. Later, other countries followed. This operational integration, however left the IT system and task interrelation of Oce and Canon staff relatively independent of each other. Since Oce Technologies operated on an ERP system landscape very different from the one of Canon - it resulted in department operations taking place in two or more different IT landscapes in parallel.

In 2012, after more Canon sales organizations across EMEA integrated their organizations with Oce Technologies - a project to started which aimed to unify the IT technologies across the two entities and to improve the customer experience. In years 2012-2013 it tackled the aftersales service areas, customer contact centers and engineer support. This resulted in restructuring where some newly formed organizations retained staff from the former Oce Technologies.

In 2014 – integration of remaining operational areas commenced, such as sales, procurement, supply chain, and finance among others. The author of this thesis joined this project in 2014 with a purpose of helping integrate the finance activities across two multinational entities and help defining and implementing the new IT application landscape and future

business practices around it.

That year - Canon Europa N.V started a large-scale project in designing and implementing a new ERP system across its European sales companies, including the acquired parts of Oce Technologies companies. Named “Unity” - it aimed at implementing a ‘blueprint’ of solutions and business processes in a ‘one size fits all’ fashion to the sales organizations across Europe, which follows the policies and standards that Canon has centrally set.

Respondent E has identified that senior management evaluated the strategic fitness (Jemison & Sitkin, 1986) of the two merging organizations: