Title: A comparative study of proprietary ERP and open source ERP modules on the value chain

Authors: Sang-Heui Lee, Silvana Trimi, Donghyun Choi, Jin Sung Rha

Addresses: Department of Management, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0491, USA. ' Department of Management, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0491, USA. ' Department of Management, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0491, USA. ' Department of Management, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0491, USA

Abstract: There have been many successful outcomes from open-source software (OSS) development, such as Firefox web browser, Apache server application, Linux operating system, etc. Due to time and cost constraints, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) cannot afford proprietary enterprise software. Therefore, there is an increased demand for open-source development of enterprise software from SMBs. Many studies have been done on implementation of large scale proprietary enterprise software, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM). However, open-source enterprise software implementation has not received much spotlight yet, in spite of its potentials as a disruptive innovation. In this study, we investigate types of ERP modules developed by an OSS community, SourceForge.net (SF). We classified 447 the most popular ERP projects of SF into 14 categories of proprietary ERP software used in previous studies. When we analysed (by a qualitative method) the contents of each category, we found that SMBs are using OSS for different ERP modules developed and provided by commercial vendors.

Keywords: open source software; enterprise resource planning; value chain; content analysis; enterprise information systems; proprietary ERP; open source ERP; OSS; SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIDS.2011.038839

International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, 2011 Vol.3 No.1, pp.26 - 38

Published online: 30 Oct 2014 *

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