Be Involved: Implementing SaaS ERP Systems for SMEs

In recent years delivering information services over the internet – cloud computing - quickly became a new trend to attract the low-cost markets. ERP vendors targeting SMEs saw an opportunity to exploit the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to deliver ERP solutions. SaaS became an attractive solution for small businesses as it reduced the initial hardware and software licensing expenses that had scared most small enterprises away. Some researchers even refer to SaaS-Based ERP systems as a new third generation of ERP following the client-server and mainframes architectures. Although SaaS provided these intuitive advantages over previous architectures the challenges of implementing ERP systems in SMEs still remain. Indeed the adoption rate of SaaS-Based ERP systems has remained low compared to other information systems delivered on the cloud in the past years.