Abstract
Nowadays most of large companies have been using an ERP system, thus ERP vendors are moving their attention toward small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by offering simplified and cheaper solutions. Such an approach is mostly due to SMEs' lack of internal competence and resources, while most of large companies have been investing time, money and human resources to modify their strategies and exploit the opportunities related to the business use of information technologies. Experiences on the field show that SMEs often fail in recognizing the economic and organizational impacts related to the use of ERP systems: as a consequence, the evaluation of acquiring an ERP system, instead of choosing a system supporting specific business functions, is a strategic decision that, mostly within SMEs, should be supported by evaluation models. Starting from a theoretical model analysing the opportunity of acquiring an ERP system according to the evaluation of both the business complexity and the level of organizational change, this work aims at verifying on the field the hypotheses of this model as well as to look for other criteria suggesting the most suitable solution according to the business features. This paper will describe in detail the results coming from a survey on a set of 79 Italian SMEs.