Analysis of EDI success implementation factors and their interrelationship with the level of EDI implementation within Swedish companies

Abstract: This thesis concerns the electronic data interchange (EDI) which is being used for transferring information between organisations in the supply chain. The benefits and barriers of using EDI are highlighted throughout the introduction stage of our research work. In spite of the evident advantages of the EDI system, it has been emphasised by many researches and practitioners that the implementation of the EDI system can result in both positive and negative effects for the companies. A proper implementation of the EDI system may eliminate or at least minimise its disadvantages and improve the effectiveness of the EDI system. In the theoretical framework stage, we are focusing on different factors that might affect the successful implementation of EDI. Looking through different EDI-related literature, it has been identified that there are 13 factors that are contributed to being very successful in the implementation of the EDI system. In order to identify the importance of the selected factors, their rank has been calculated in the analysis part. The next stage of our analysis deals with measuring the correlation between the criticality degrees of 13 success factors and changes in the level of EDI implementation. Only 3 out of 13 success factors have been defined as sensitive to the improvements in EDI level. An additional result from our research was that the level of EDI implementation significantly predicts perceived overall success of the EDI network. By expanding our research, an analysis of the criticality of the EDI implementation success factors for the companies from manufacturing and service sector has been provided. As a final point of our study, we would like to mention that the findings of this study should be of value for practitioners as well as for academics. For practitioners these results can be used as a guideline in reaping the benefits of EDI technology. For academics it provides a starting-point for further research in this area, and especially to the successful EDI implementation at the international level.