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1. Introduction
In today’s dynamic and turbulent business environment, there is a strong need for organizations to become globally competitive. The survival guide to competitiveness is to be closer to the customer and deliver value-added product and services in the shortest possible time. This, in turn, demands integration of the business processes of an enterprise, which is the stronghold of ERP. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a software-driven business management system that integrates all facets of the business. ERP is a complex system (Helo et al., 2008; Bansal and Negi, 2008). Organizations of all sizes, small, medium and large are making an effort to integrate their businesses by deploying ERP systems. An ERP project is an expensive project costing anywhere between 1 and 3 percent of the turnover of a company if ERP covers all functions of the organization. The cost will be proportionally less if some functions are not included in the ERP. An ERP project in an SME takes anywhere between six months and two years. A schedule overrun causes budget overrun as well (Sun et al., 2005). An organization also looks forward to achieving certain benefits from the ERP system once it is deployed. The first critical success factor (CSF) – stress the enterprise, not the system, was identified in 1997. One should find an ERP system that closely matches the processes of the organization and modify the processes to take care of the gaps between the ERP offering and organization’s processes (Davenport, 1998). Since then many researchers have put in effort to identify CSFs. There are close to 40 reasons listed in the literature for failure of an ERP project (Amid et al., 2012) for SMEs. CSFs have been ranked in order of their criticality. Further to ranking, it has been shown that CSFs are not independent by a few researchers (we will elaborate this point in Section 2).
In this paper, we have made an attempt to establish relationships among CSFs that have been identified for SMEs. SMEs cannot be considered as scaled-down version of larger ones (Federici, 2009). Studying SMEs is important because in many countries SMEs are major contributors to the economy. Many countries have a separate ministry for SMEs. India has a ministry for...