Project planning practices based on enterprise resource planning systems in small and medium enterprises - A case study from the Republic of Macedonia

This paper examines whether Macedonian SMEs plan for the implementation of ERP projects and studies the effect of project planning practices on project success. Four project planning measures were taken into consideration: business case development, scope planning, baseline plan development and risk planning along with three measures of project success; customer satisfaction, perceived quality of the project and success of the implementation process. The study was based on a survey that was conducted on 30 SMEs in the Republic of Macedonia. Data dimensionality was reduced through factor analysis and relationships between the two sets of variables were analyzed by correlation and regression analyses. The findings demonstrated that Macedonian SMEs implemented general project planning practices, even though they did not consider the planning process as a separate phase of the ERP implementation. However, they did not use any particular project planning tools, such as the Gantt chart or WBS. Of the project planning practices that were surveyed, the most practiced were the development of a business case, project scope and baseline plan. The least practiced were risk planning practices. Considering the success of the ERP implementations, this study demonstrated that most of the companies' representatives perceive this undertaking as successful in terms of client satisfaction and perceived quality measures. A higher percentage of respondents found their ERP implementations unsuccessful in terms of implementation process measures, when compared to the previous two success parameters. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.