The Core Critical Success Factors in Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Extracting Core CSFs

In this study, after extracting CSFs from published literature, those CSFs which were most commonly mentioned in previous research were given higher priority and were selected as the core success factor. 62 papers from international journals and conference proceeding were selected, which were published during 2000 -2009.

In the next step, 60 CSFs were extracted from these articles. Since the core CSFs are those that have been identified by the majority of previous papers, the frequency of CSFs (the number of times that a CSF appears in the selected articles) is an appropriate criterion for extracting them. Thus, content analysis, a quantitative approach─ counting the frequency of phenomena within a case in order to gauge its importance compared with other cases (Walliman, 2001), was employed. The Entropy method which quantifies the frequency of CSFs to the values that can be used for determining their degree of importance was utilized in the next step. In other words, when a CSF has been frequently identified by previous studies, it must be highly correlated with the level of importance and can be selected as a candidate for the core CSFs. We should also mention that, two CSFs with different titles but the same definition were assumed identical.