The deployment of projects for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business process reengineering (BPR) is fraught with difficulty and risk, and at the same type capable of returning great value. The interdependencies between these two paradigms and their impacts on the success of deployment projects is the subject of this paper. The authors describe two established approaches to the analysis of internal and external strategy for these activities: a resource-based view (RBV) and a market-based view (MBV).

RBV takes the approach that the firm can develop a sustained competitive advantage if the internal (and possible externally available) resources are valuable, hard to acquire, costly to imitate, and nonreplaceable (nonfungible). The authors suggest these resources are strictly internal. But this view ignores partnering and “staff augmentation” providers, which are often present in the rapidly growing industries where ERP is being deployed. This view attempts to explain why firms in the same industry perform differently.

The research method of “stylized fact” creates an overly complex approach to what seems like a simple question: which drivers do RBV or MBV indicate as likely to produce success for an ERP project and a BPR project? The validation of this research question is summarized in table 3. The columns RBV and MBV are nearly identical. Earlier in the paper, table 2 shows the quality of the sources used to assess the differences in the hypothesis represented by table 3. The top drivers are “fit of the organization to the ERP system,” “avoiding doing BPR while deploying ERP,” “BPR should be conducted as part of ERP,” and “top management support.” The second and third items appear to conflict.

The authors add to these stylized facts a description of the critical success factors (CSFs) for an ERP implementation, drawn from a variety of references. The original reference to Rockart would have provided an anchor for connecting CSFs to the items in table 2. As the paper reaches its conclusion, the authors interpret each of the categories used to assess the stylized facts in relation to the BPR and ERP implementation. I found these more useful than the stylized facts for informing the decisions on what impacts the success of ERP or BPR projects.

There are several gaps or errors in the paper. At the end of section 5, there is a reference to stylized facts 23 through 34, but the list in table 3 ends at 29. The term “proof” is used when “show” would be more appropriate when suggesting both doing and not doing BPR during the ERP deployment. This conflict, as part of the research, reveals the inherent conflict in ERP system success. This discovery is the core value of the paper. There are many CSFs that are clear and concise, but deciding to reengineer the work processes while deploying the ERP is a major decision for the firm. This paper establishes the critical nature of that decision.

One gap is the suggestion that the ERP or BPR should be considered as a means to break down strategic objectives into daily business processes and linking strategy into business process and ERP software. The authors do not describe how this can be done, leaving the reader looking for further research.