توانمندسازی مزایای پیاده سازی سیستم های ERP Empowering Benefits of ERP Systems Implementation: Empirical Study of Industrial Firms

1. Introduction Regarding the abundance of information in organizations, nowadays implementing a system that can manage the information appropriately is worthwhile. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system that by establishing integrity, solving crucial issues including saving repetitive information in sporadic systems of organization, re-entering the existent information in systems, lack of effective communication among various functions and lack of access to appropriate information at required time (Davenport, 1998). Capabilities of this system caused that besides the commercial units; public and private organizations also initiated to implement it and provided the basis for developing customer services. The most important stakeholders of this system are employees and managers due to the fact that they are interacting with this system. Today, managers cannot expect high results from their staff unless they provide the grounds of achieving such results in them (Hayton, 2005) and by developing the required ground, equip their human resources with required knowledge and skill in order for them to guide other resources of the organization into the acquisition of growth and development (MacMillan, 1987). Employee empowerment is one of the requisites of providing these grounds that includes a wide range of activities from pretending empowerment (Rosenthal et al., 1997) to higher levels of cooperation and granting the actual power (Greasley et al., 2008). This potential concept can be followed by lots of advantages for organizations. Perhaps the best interpretation of these advantages is the win-win situation for organizations and employees (Lashley, 1999). The results of some studies showed that lack of employees’ power in applying ERP is the most important reason for failure of the projects of this system (Sehgal & Stewart, 2003). Thus employee empowerment in stages of pre-implementation, while-implementation, and even postimplementation of these systems is obligatory. On the contrary, the question that can be posed here is that implementing ERP would basically lead into empowering benefits for employees and managers or not. Investigating the impacts and benefits of ERP in organizations and determining direct and indirect influences on empowerment of organizational employees is an important issue which should be taken into consideration despite the fact that to my best knowledge, no study has been conducted in this field so far. Regarding the fact that large companies in Iran have initiated implementation and utilization of ERP in the recent years, the present study intends to investigate empirically and compare the empowering benefits of employees and managers resulted from ERP in three holding companies of Iran Khodro Industrial Group Company,