Is permanent external consulting necessary for post-implementation stage?

Abstract: IT executives face nowadays a theme that underlies for all questions in today's business – the change! The main factor that accelerates the “pace of change” is globalization. Globalization conducts to severe competition; it conducts also to shorter product life cycles that are necessary aspects for companies in order to increase competitive advan-tage. A good alternative to be more efficient and gain access to better information is to implement an ERP system that will allow companies to improve efficiency and be more proactive. The main benefits of an ERP system are that it gives more controls over the company's assets, and business processes such as financial supply chain management and profitability assessments of employees, departments and customers. Most of the companies after implementing the system choose to end their relationship with the ERP system supplier and believe that they have the capacity to maintain and develop the sys-tem by themselves. The post-implementation represents the use and operation after the ERP system is put into use. The definite purpose is to investigate why some companies choose to reject the perma-nent external support concerning the maintenance and further development of the ERP post-implementation stage. The paper will present the diverse reasons to why the re-spondents choose to not use permanent external support. In order to find accurate information we have interviewed companies within the Jönköping's county that are in the post-implementation stage. Our purpose was to un-derstand the reason to why some companies reject permanent consulting and how they are developing and maintaining the used ERP system. To make this study more accurate we have used theories about ERP systems and the post-implementation stage that will help us to support and give value to our results. One of the main results of this research were that companies have only personal moti-vation concerning the consulting activity choices and they affirmed that the result of the implemented ERP system would be the same no matter which alternative they choose for maintaining and developing the ERP system. The overall impression concerning consulting activities is quite positive among the interviewed companies.