ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) ADOPTION AND CUSTOMIZATION IN HIGH-GROWTH STARTUPS

The startups that experienced high growth are confronted by operational challenges never seen before as they grow beyond small teams to enterprise level organisations. The study examines trends in the adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and the use of customization techniques within the sample consisting of 127 high-growth startups in the technology, e-commerce, and manufacturing industries. In mixture of both, surveys, interviews, and case-studies; we explore the role of startups in their ERP selection, implementation, and customization decision making at critical stages of growth. Our results indicate that 73 percent of successful high-growth startups adopt ERP systems by the time they are 100-employees, and cloud-based problems prevail in their adoption trends. The approaches to customization depend greatly on the needs of the industry, and the SaaS startups would prefer using the minimal customization strategies, whereas the manufacturing startups would have to make significant changes to the workflow. The paper reports five essential success factors in the adoption of startup ERP namely executive leadership dedication, gradual implementation strategies, user-oriented training plans, vendor partner choices, and scalable architecture planning. The insights offer hands-on guidelines to startup founders, technology managers, and the ERP vendors who plan to enter into the high-growth market segment.