Challenges of Enterprise Resource Planning implementation in Iran large organizations

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a fully integrated business management system covering functional areas of an enterprise like Logistics, Production, Finance, Accounting and Human Resources. The implementation of this system is a difficult and high cost proposition that places tremendous demands on corporate time and resources. Most of the ERP implementations have been classified as failures because they did not achieve predetermined corporate goals. The main goal of this research is determining the most important challenges of ERP implementation in Iran large organizations and our case study was the Isfahan Telecommunication. The population of this study consists of the 1500 employees of this organization from which 40 experts and employees were selected randomly and uniformly as a sample. We used questionnaire and interviews to collect data and analyzed them by SPSS using one sample t-test. The result of the study shows that the most important challenges of ERP implementation are organizational barriers, especially lack of human resources with the weighted average of 267.33. The next important issues of ERP implementation are technological factors such as unbalanced combination in team projects and then individual factors like lack of senior executives' involvement with the weighted average of 48.8 are the least important challenges in ERP implementation. We selected Isfahan Telecommunication as a large organization in Iran to identify the ERP challenges.We used questionnaire and interviews to test our hypothesis.Organizational barriers such as Lack of human resources are the main ERP implementing challenge.Technological factors and individual factors are the next important challenges to implement ERP.ERP system should be easy to learn, software and hardware requirement have to be sufficient, appropriate and up to date and managers' commitment and support have to be high.