ABSTRACT
The market for Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) has significantly changed over the past decade. At least in Denmark, manufacturing enterprises, which previously were used to close ‘partner-like’ collaboration with their IT supplier, now face mass-producing software houses and their allies among consulting companies, hardware suppliers, customers and so on. These communities challenge the management of technology at the organizational level, since configuring generic packages, and shaping them to meet the companies’ diverse needs, is a major task. This constitutes political processes of alliance building, choice and compromise. This chapter’s aim is to analyse how the communities impact on company implementation. In doing this, it combines two long-term processual fieldwork studies of political processes at plant level, twenty-five shorter case studies of implementation and use of ERP, and a macro-oriented study of the three ERP communities around the three systems SAP R/3, BaaN IV and Navision XAL.
