Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach for assessing the status of alignment between organizations and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems—more friendly and quantitatively. Design/methodology/approach – An issue-based ERP assessment model is invented based on thorough literature review and empirical data from three Japanese companies. A modified Cartesian coordinate system is adopted to link the alignment criteria and the system maintenance activities. Findings – The findings prove the feasibility of the model and reveal the variation of ERP alignment in a visualized way. It is also indicated that the utilization of the issue-based ERP assessment model is a more convenient method to help the organizations to pinpoint the status of the ERP alignment. Originality/value – This is the first approach to measuring the business–information technology alignment visually. One major implication of this research is to provide an easy assessment method which may encourage organizations to do evaluations regularly. The information accumulated by regular assessment can further pinpoint the perfect time to make decisions and provide essential evidence for decision makings, such as when to expand or retire the current system. From the academic perspective, this model provides a new approach to evaluating the assimilation of organizations and ERP systems.

Introduction

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system generally refers to a software architecture that integrates the complete range of a business’s processes and functions in order to present a holistic view of the business from single information and information technology (IT) architecture (Klaus et al., 2000). It is considered to be a comprehensive solution seek to integrate business processes and functions in order to present a holistic view of the business from a single IT architecture (Klaus et al., 2000). With the development of IT and the demands of organizations, the ERP system originated from manufacturing cores has been able to cover nearly all essential processes and functions of organizations and became one of the most widespread information systems (ISs) during the past two decades. Recently, traditional ERP in organizations, such as on-Premise ERP, has already been increasingly impacted by emerging IT, such as cloud services and social media technologies. A recent survey conducted by Gartner group in 2013 reveals that 47 percent of the organizations planned to move to cloud-based systems within the next five years (Rayner, 2014). The dilemma of ERP switching appears more serious to large enterprises (LEs) may be because the legacy system which had cost a lot. There are already considerable cases in which organizations have successfully replaced a traditional ERP system with a new type of ERP system. As a matter of fact, in a recent study, Huang (2016) found out that within 40 organizations in Japan that have conducted ERP switching/reversion, 29 are LEs. For the majority, whether or not making this critical decision still lacks reliable methods and experience to back up. One critical issue is how those organizations can aware of the right timing to decide to switch or revise the current ERP. In other words, is there any way to reveal the status of the alignment between business and system whenever necessary? In order to deal with the above issue, the primary step is to assess the ERP system whether it still fits the organization. Indeed, considerable evaluation methods can be found in the previous literature.