ERP Marketing andItalian SMEs

Abstract The growing relevance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has raised much attention in the academic literature, business practice and media. Current literature and thought are primarily focused on two aspects of this phenomenon: the economic and organizational impact of the adoption of ERPs inside a firm, and the best way to manage that adoption. While these research questions are certainly critical, our aim stands upstream: to explore the marketing activities of ERP vendors, checking if the marketing tenets for B2B selling are followed or not. The study of suppliers’ marketing approach – rather than adopter’s practices - may explain a good part of success/failure of ERPs diffusion and adoption. We conducted a survey on nearly 150 installations of ERP in Italian SMEs. The results showed that the marketing competencies of vendors are not extensively developed or, if anything, are not fully leveraged. In particular, often vendors are too focused on selling ERP solutions to existing and known customers, refraining from searching new clients, and therefore failing to explore the extension of the potential market to its fullest. The marketing tenet of relationship is here myopically applied, keeping suppliers too tied to their current customers. A further finding is that few suppliers are willing to involve network partners in the sales stage, preferring to deal with customers by themselves. This is contrary to the dictates of literature that see each B2B relationship embedded in a network. The implications of our research is that part of ERPs diffusion and success is determined by the marketing abilities of suppliers, rather than low demand or failure in adoption processes by clients. Marketing competencies of suppliers-resellers should be fostered in order to allow ERP producers to really reach their market.. ERP systems have been defined as comprehensive software solutions that integrate organizational processes through shared information and data flows (Shanks and Seddon, 2000). ERP systems, therefore, are marketed as a vehicle for the integration of an enterprise’s core business activities, such as finance, logistics and human resources, and as a means of overcoming problems associated with the so-called ‘‘legacy systems’’. They are based on developing a common IT infrastructure and common business processes. In the past, many incompatible systems and processes co-existed, especially in large globally distributed corporations, making integration difficult. Our opinion is that ERP systems can play an important part in leveraging organizational competitiveness, by improving the way in which strategically valuable information is produced, shared and managed across functions and locations. ERP systems, therefore, have been strongly promoted, promising improved competitiveness, by increasing productivity, reducing costs and improving decision quality and resource control, thereby enabling a leaner production (Communications of the ACM, 2000). Therefore, firms are motivated to adopt ERP systems in the hope of increasing productivity and efficiency.