An assessment methodology for IT management enterprise systems adoption in SMEs and Start-Ups

The assessment and objective quantification of the contributions and impacts to value-added creation resulting from the adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is still challenging. Since IT systems aim at supporting the broad management process of the company, their implementation often compels radical organizational changes. The corporate reorganization and the learning/tuning of such systems affect costs, and require expenditure of company resources and a large period for employee training. Despite the great effort required to complete these tasks, the era of digitization and the Internet of Things (IoT) is imposing this transition. In fact, IT enables tracking and monitoring all operations carried out in the company (logistics, material handling and warehousing, purchasing and procurement, customer management and after-sale services, etc.) to preserve and/or increase market share by optimizing the overall performance. Starting with the state-of-the-art analysis of the benefits of using enterprise software, the paper suggests an approach to be adopted by small-medium companies and start-ups in selecting the right IT support solution. The attention will be focused mainly on the most appropriate solutions that cope with the high costs typical of these software packages, amortizable for large corporations, but not often affordable for companies in the early stage of their development.