Fiercely global competition and Taiwan’s readiness to go along with WTO’s requirement have put tremendous pressure on companies on this island to be more responsive to market by becoming more internally integrated enterprise and leveraging limited resources to exert synergy.
The motivation that ERP systems are implemented are from several sources: internal system integration from an Intranet prespective, process efficiency improvement, upgrading legacy system, imitation from competitors. The electronics industries, which have been taking orders outsourced from multi-nation companies, are under great pressure from their international partners to implement ERP systems in order to capture the synergy effect of supply chain management. In addition, government subsidies for IT related investment in responding to Y2K crisis has encouraged companies to replace their old systems with ERP systems.

The major problem confronted to the company that has implemented an ERP system is how to realize the benefits accompanied with the ERP implementation.

Managerial adaptation is usually required when companies introduce a new technology. Thus, this research applies Leonard-Barton’s perspective as the reference structure and adopts case study methodology to investigate how the three dimensions (technical, delivery system and organizational performance) could be related to the four chosen companies (an adaptor manufacturer, a passive component manufacturer, an IC packaging company and a LCD/LCM manufacturer). The data was collected mainly through semi-structured interviews. By doing the above, this research would like to explore the relationship between ERP implementation and organizational adaptation.
Based on conventional wisdom, business process reengineering(BPR) goes together with ERP implementation. The research results indicated that BPR in these four cases was conducted according to the built-in system flows of the ERP package adopted. Because of this system-oriented implementation, the targeted company can exploit the integrity and internal flow of the implemented ERP to improve its information flows and strengthens the connection across different departments in the company.

The system integrity and the paradigm of built-in flow are the main benefits derived from ERP implementation from the technology perspective. Guided by the built-in flow, the company can adapt itself through learning and obtain potential synergy. However, by so doing, the company is exposed to the risk of system function inadequacy and the deleterious impact brought by BPR, which is conducted without active participation of the user organization.
In summary, the potential hazard of technology dimension comes from system function inadequacy and system transplant without conducting proper BPR. This in turn will increase the risk of software project and incur potential costs such as compromise and system tuning. According to data available, this research suggests that:
1.In case that ERP system function does not meet customer requirement, the system integrity should be preserved.
2.Guided by the built-in ERP system flow, the company can keep learning and achieve evolutionary change.
3.Change management is essential to ERP system delivery in order to realize the benefits of implementation.

In summary, ERP implementation requires a careful mapping analysis of system function and user requirement. In addition, companies should pay more attention to managerial adaptation to enable organizational change and gain benefits through continuous learning.