The Empirical Study On Affecting Factors Of ERP Implementation Knowledge Transfer

The rapid development of information technology has changed economy and social life deeply. The rapid updating of product, the shorten product's life time, and the fierce competency of international marketing, all these push corporation into a context to improve its competent capacity in any ways. With the advantage of process-orient and information integration, Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has been the powerful weapon for modern corporations to improve management and gain competence.To implement ERP is going to death, and not to implement ERP is waiting for death. It's the rule of thumb which hesitate the manager on the decision of ERP. And many information management and organization management scholars turned to the interesting issue of ERP, such as critical success factors of ERP, organization learning and technology innovation. Mandy scholars investigated the factors effecting knowledge transfer in individual, group and organization levels in the past decades. And there are several effecting factor constructs. At the same time, the studies on ERP CSFs have accumulated lots of classical research. But few empirical researches study the factors effecting knowledge transfer during ERP implementation.Based on knowledge transfer theory, ERP CSFs, and reflections during ERP implementation participation and interviews of 14 corperations implemented ERP, the paper studies the factors effecting knowledge transfer between consultant and key user in ERP implementation project with empirical data. The conception of ERP implementation knowledge is constructed by ERP knowledge and business process knowledge. Upon this conception, two testing models are constructed including model I: from consultant to key user's ERP knowledge transfer effecting factors model, and model II: from key user to consultant's business process knowledge transfer effecting factors model. The research model constructed by four effecting factor constructs— the characteristic of knowledge transferred (tacitness and causual ambiguity), the characteristic of transfer context (transfer activity, implementation context and arduous relationship), the characteristic of source (transfer willingness and encoding communication capacity), and the characteristic of recipient (acquirement willingness, absorptive capacity and decoding commnunication capacity).With SPSS 13.0, prior analysis was done on 172 valid sample (107 key user questionnaires and 65 consultant questionnaires) from 85 ERP implementation project, including analysis of sample characteristics, testing reliability and validity of measurement system. Then correlation analysis, ANOVA, general liner regression and hierarchical multiple regression model were used to test the main effect and mediator effect hypothesis.The empirical analysis shows that transfer activity is the full-mediator variable of knowledge transfer and it's anticipants of source's transfer willingness and recipient's acquirement willingness. And transfer activity is the semi-mediator variable of knowledge transfer and it's anticipant of recipient's absorptive capacity, only 15% of absorptive capacity is mediated by transfer activity.The empirical test of model I show that implementation context has the most direct effect on ERP knowledge transfer, and the direct effect of transfer activity, key user's absorptive capacity and the tacitness of ERP knowledge are distinct. Consultant's transfer willingness and key user's acquirement willingness have indirect effect on ERP knowledge transfer through transfer activity. Key user's decoding communication capacity and consultant's encoding communication capacity have distinct effect on arduous relationship between two parts.The empirical test of model II shows that transfer activity, arduous relationship and consultant's absorptive capacity have distinct direct effect on business process knowledge transfer. Key user's transfer willingness has indirect effect on business process knowledge transfer. Key user's encoding communication capacity and consultant's decoding communication capacity have effect on business process knowledge transfer through arduous relationship.Analyzed from individual level, the paper studies on the bidirectional knowledge transfer between key user and implementation consultant, and clarifies the meditor effect of transfer activity, which deepen and complete the research on ERP knowledge transfer. The empirical data answer the three questions in introduction section, and provide advice on the benchmarking of desirable key user and implementation consultant. At last, the paper explores the limitation and shortage of the research, and displays the future research in extending research cases, respondents and scope, the role of project member, member turnover's effect on knowledge transfer et al.The contribution or innovation of this research may be:1. Based on the theory of knowledge transfer and ERP CSFs, the paper constructs the theoretical model of factors affecting ERP implementation knowledge transfer. The empirical work proofs the meditor effect of transfer activity in ERP implementation knowledge transfer, which provides a new theoretical perspective and systematic frame of analysis for the study on relevant research of knowledge transfer in ERP implementation.Cummings explored the moderator effect of transfer activity on other affecting factors in knowledge transfer, and GuanTao proofed the mediator effect of transfer activity. But Guan couldn't proof the mediator effect of transfer activity on motivation. The empirical test and analysis show that transfer activity is a full-mediator variable of knowledge transfer and its antecedents of source's transfer willingness and recipient's acquirement willingness. And it's a semi-mediator variable of knowledge transfer and its antecedents of recipient's absorptive capacity. The research further completes the theoretical model of factors affecting knowledge transfer.2. The thesis explores the knowledge transfer between key user and consultant, including the two transfer processes of ERP knowledge transferred from consultant to key user and the business process knowledge transferred from key user to consultant. The two transfer processes complement the single transfer process in prior knowledge transfer research.Keep the same of prior studies, Dong-Gil explored ERP knowledge transfer from the single direction of knowledge transfer from consultant to client. Only Yong and Young-ryeol studied the knowledge flow-in and flow-out of single subsidiary, andproofed the different effect of factors between the two knowledge flow. This empirical research further attest this argue and promote the development of knowledge transfer research in ERP field.3. Key user and consultant, the main research players in this thesis, are both to be the recipient and source during ERP implementation knowledge transfer. So this study explores both the recipient characteristics and source characteristics of the two knowledge transfer participients. With the attention to choose desirable participents to Mill ERP implementation project in practice, the individual characteristics,such as degreee, ERP experience and working experience, are explored in this research. Thus, this study developes a more comprehensive constructs to explore the characteristics of knowledge transfer participients.The empirical data indicate that the key criteria to choose key user is not degree, ERP experience and working experience, but the communication competence, willingness (acquisition willingness and transfer willingness), and absorptive capacity. The key criteria to choose consultant is not degree, ERP industry experience and ERP project experience, but the ERP working experience, trasnfer willingness, communication competency, and absorptive capacity.4. This thesis designs some indicators to measure the affecting factors of ERP implementation knowledge transfer. For example, the paper argues to measure ERP knowledge transfer from management philosophy, implementation methodology, and system technology know-how. Although the indicators should be improved in future, and the validity of them should be tested repeatedly, they might provide some reference and basis for relevant research in the future.