Adoption of Cloud ERP - Empirical investigation of EU and Indian SMEs

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adoption factors have been studied quite extensively over the years. However, this master thesis tries to investigate upon the less explored area of Cloud ERPs. Relatively less research has been conducted, when it comes to adoption of Cloud ERP especially in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs of the European Union (EU) and India are specifically targeted, as they both represent non-homogeneous markets which make a significant contribution in the respective economies. Primarily, the Cloud ERP adoption factors are identified and classified into different dimensions using the Technology, Organization and External task environment (TOE) framework. Important dimensions of ‘Awareness’ and ‘Company characteristics’ are also added to this research model. Furthermore, the data analysis is done to understand the demographics, mean agreement levels, correlations and standard deviations among the identified factors of Cloud ERP adoption. The research findings indicate that ‘Cloud awareness’ is the major barrier of Cloud ERP adoption, for SMEs of the EU and India. Moreover, some Technical, Organizational and External factor correlations are also discovered with respect to ERP adoption. Furthermore, evidences are dispensed to support some of the previous research done in Cloud ERP domain. All the results are presented in a comparative manner, where SMEs of the EU and India are compared and contrasted. However, due to a low statistical power, the significance of some results could not be established. Despite the research limitations, the findings confirm a high potential for the Cloud ERP market within EU and Indian SMEs, and further recommend the Cloud ERP vendors to focus on Cloud awareness. Finally, the research also makes literature contributions and advocates the future scope of research in the Cloud ERP landscape.