A Comparative Study of Issues Affecting ERP Implementation in Large Scale and Small Medium Scale Enterprises in India: A Pareto Approach

paper attempts to explore and identify issues affecting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation in context to Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises. Issues which are considered more important for large scale enterprises may not be of equal importance for a small and medium scale enterprise and hence replicating the implementation experience which holds for large organizations will not a wise approach on the part of the implementation vendors targeting small scale enterprises. This paper attempts to highlight those specific issues where a different approach needs to be adopted. Pareto analysis has been applied to identify the issues for Indian SMEs and Large scale enterprises as available from the published literature. Also by doing comparative analysis between the identified issues for Indian large enterprises and SMEs four issues are proved to be crucial for SMEs in India but not for large enterprises such as proper system implementation strategy, clearly defined scope of implementation procedure, proper project planning and minimal customization of the system selected for implementation, because of some limitations faced by the Indian SMEs compared to large enterprises.