The extent to which an ERP can be customized is a major factor that contributes to the overall cost of the ERP. The easy and quick an ERP is to customize, the less it would cost to change every time a change occurs in business process that it automated. The customizability of an ERP is a contribution of several technical factors. For example, the ease with which business logic can be represented through ERP programming language, multi-language support, modularity and several other factors contribute to make an ERP fully customizable. Hence, when considering an ERP it is important for organizations to go through these factors in order to gain an initial estimate of how high the cost can go even after an ERP is implemented successfully (Telenov 2009).
1.4 Other Technical Considerations
Another important consideration which should be made when a purchase of an ERP is considered is its support for hardware. Many organizations suffer from tremendous additional costs because the implementation of ERP either requires them to introduce a major change in their current IT infrastructure. This cost is further spiralled by the fact that many business tend to ignore the hardware features supported by the ERP, hence end up with additional cost of hardware upgrade. This cost could have easily been saved by implementation of an ERP which supported the latest features of hardware (such as virtualization) which could have allowed the use of hardware to their maximum (Erlanger 2006).
1.5 Research Objective
The objective of this research is to study and understand the unique requirements of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and establish a framework for selecting an ERP based on technical consideration with respect to those requirements.
1.6 Research Questions
The research being conducted will attempt to seek the answers to the following research questions. However, it should be clearly understood that these research questions are not complete. Any other information which is considered useful for achieving the desired research outcome would be included in the research.
– What advantages does the use of ERP offers to SMEs?
– What consideration do SMEs make the selection for an ERP?
– What affect does the Programming support have on the selection of ERP by an organization?
– How does the built-in business support of ERP affect the selection of ERP?
– How do language and other supporting features affect the choice of ERP?
– What is the difference between a Form base ERP and a Web based ERP?
– What other features of an ERP need to be considered in the selection process?
– How have the business benefitted from technical features of ERP?
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