Inventing a business-ERP alignment assessment model through three Japanese companies

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach for assessing the status of alignment between organizations and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems—more friendly and quantitatively. Design/methodology/approach: An issue-based ERP assessment model is invented based on thorough literature review and empirical data from three Japanese companies. A modified Cartesian coordinate system is adopted to link the alignment criteria and the system maintenance activities. Findings: The findings prove the feasibility of the model and reveal the variation of ERP alignment in a visualized way. It is also indicated that the utilization of the issue-based ERP assessment model is a more convenient method to help the organizations to pinpoint the status of the ERP alignment. Originality/value: This is the first approach to measuring the business–information technology alignment visually. One major implication of this research is to provide an easy assessment method which may encourage organizations to do evaluations regularly. The information accumulated by regular assessment can further pinpoint the perfect time to make decisions and provide essential evidence for decision makings, such as when to expand or retire the current system. From the academic perspective, this model provides a new approach to evaluating the assimilation of organizations and ERP systems.