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The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical challenges in the implementation of cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). The challenges identified were customization, organizational change, long-term costs, business complexity, loss of information technology competencies, legal issues, integration, data extraction, monitoring, migration, security, network dependency, limited functionality, awareness, performance, integrity of provider, perception, and subscription costs. Here the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large organizations were differentiated with respect to the challenges identified. This paper also suggested ranked lists of challenges both for SMEs and large organizations.

An online survey was conducted and data of 93 respondents were analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to statistically test the data. Here the SMEs and large organizations were differentiated with respect to the challenges identified.

This study shows that SMEs and large organizations differ from each other for most of the challenges except business complexity, integration, monitoring, security, limited functionality, performance, and integrity of provider. Also from the ranked list of challenges in cloud ERP, security was the top concern for both SMEs and large organizations.

The findings may help organizations to get a broad idea about the challenges which are critical for the implementation of cloud ERP.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical framework to measure the safety performance of workers in the Indian construction industry. The key safety performance indicators are identified and ordered on the premise that the higher order assignment of an indicator implies a strong indication of an effective safety performance.

Various indicators of safety performance in the construction industry were identified from extant literature review combined with author's personal viewpoint. The identified variables were inquired for appropriateness for the Indian construction scenario by consultation with experts. Fuzzy Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) technique was considered for the ranking of the indicators from most to least important.

The most important highlight of the study was the importance of the role of management by participating in informing workers about the safety rules and compliance toward safety measures. Proper and timely safety training to the workers and equipping them with sophisticated safety equipment for daily activities is perceived to be highly important in ensuring a safe and healthy workplace environment. Controlling the absenteeism rate reduces the burden of extra work on the employees, thereby, encouraging safe work-related behavior.

Senior management should make safety induction programs compulsory at the time of joining of the employees. The guidelines for safety practices, rules and information about the safety equipment should be properly documented and arranged in safety manuals. Periodical drills involving visual demonstration of the safety practices should be followed to ensure safety at workplace.

This paper aims to address procurement, logistics management, inventory control and distribution of perishable items, i.e. vegetables, fruits, flowers and fishes, during the social isolation period of the Covid-19 era to identify conflicting interests among the channel members; present inventory and information sharing scenario; and reveal organizational dispute and existence of redundant, nonessential and corrupted members in the supply chain.

This study uses an exploratory investigation to evaluate the relations among the members of the supply chain of perishable food items. In this context, it is designed to investigate the field, observe the members of the existing supply chain from rural and remote places and capture their interviews to accomplish the objectives.

This study identified that although the supply chain of perishable food items is controlled truly by private parties, from a realistic view, the private–public partnership is essential where the government should play the coordinating role. In this context, continuous interaction, coordination and information sharing among the members to establish an optimum and scalable network and remove any redundant nodal points is a key success factor for managing an efficient supply chain.

Theoretical and managerial implication of this research is enormous. The existence of functional and dysfunctional conflicts in the same supply network and how it can be detrimental to the performance of the members are exposed in this study, which can be an excellent source to be investigated. Practitioners and researchers can gain a greater understanding to identify the root causes of conflicts in the existing structural dynamics, shedding light on organizational interactions, power and group behavior during the Covid-19 era.

From the light of management and inter-organizational conflicts, this is a pioneer study that has detected the redundant channel members, their source of power and how their removal can present an optimum channel with group coherence and synergistic interest.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue on supply chains and the enterprise.

Introductory review and brief description of research papers in this issue.

To demonstrate the growing complexity and the multiple factors involved in structuring the enterprise effectively, references a paper by Iyer and Gottlieb that suggests an approach to enterprise architecture design. This integrates the internal and external environment, thus being highly relevant to supply chain issues.

Implies that the broad research framework for enterprise architecture is relevant to the study of supply chain issues, but leaves the reader to discover whether this is the case by perusing the research papers in this issue.

Links enterprise architecture to supply chain issues of importance to industry.

Provides a descriptive framework for linking papers in the issue to general supply chain issues.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships among strategy, flexibility, and performance in the supply chain context.

The research is based on a quantitative approach using a questionnaire survey and personal interviews from a total of 175 small and medium‐sized Canadian manufacturing companies. The identified constructs have been utilized to test a theoretical model using the path analysis technique.

First, the findings provide evidence of direct effects of strategy on flexibility and flexibility on performance. Second, innovative strategy firms must invest time and resources in developing new product and delivery flexibility; while customer‐oriented strategy firms are required to invest heavily in developing sourcing, product, and delivery flexibility and follower strategy firms need no investment in any specific type of flexibility. Third, results demonstrated that Canadian manufacturers must reconsider how they use information technology to enhance information systems flexibility and improve overall performance.

The measures of flexibility and strategy dimensions used to rate the supply chain organizations are a possible limitation of the research study.

Managers need to think seriously about which type of flexibility they implement and that they should not increase all dimensions of flexibility in their power; some dimensions of flexibility may not significantly contribute to the overall performance. Considering that small and medium‐sized enterprises have limited resources, it is important for managers to carefully assess their strategic needs before getting involved in any flexibility program; otherwise the result can be competitively negative.

No empirical study was found in the supply chain literature that specifically investigates the relationships among strategy, flexibility and performance in the supply chain context; the paper fills an important gap in the supply chain literature.

This study seeks to explore the role of process orientation (PO) in organizations that go through a transition in implementing enterprise systems (ESs).

Based on an empirical survey of 3,000 large Canadian and US firms, this study investigates the role of PO in various aspects of ES implementation. Exploratory factor analysis is conducted using SPSS software to identify indicators and factors of measuring PO and various aspects of ES implementation. Furthermore, the LISREL software was used to perform the path analysis to identify the role of PO.

The results of the analysis strongly suggest that the PO levels at three phases of ES implementation are independent and, hence, require separate measurement. In addition, two research models are employed to examine 14 hypotheses associated with the role of PO in ES implementation. The findings indicate that process‐oriented organizations in our sample are more successful in ES implementation and have faced fewer challenges in the transition process.

This study unveils the role of PO in successful ES implementation. The champions of transition pay special attention to PO throughout the ES implementation. The findings reveal that under certain conditions PO can hinder or support the ES implementation in organizations.

This is the first study that measures PO at three phases of ES implementation. Moreover, two research models are employed to study the research topic, namely: preliminary model, and expanded model. Measurement of PO at three stages of transition provides a unique perspective to evaluate the effect of PO in organizations.

Because of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate and adapt to changing environments and circumstances as part of business process reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change management”). Change management is non‐trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish. Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and they do not address “why” the process is the way it is.

The approach presents an actor‐dependency‐based technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities and activities.

A case study illustrates this approach.

This approach is novel in the sense that there is no similar intentional modeling approach for change management to the best of our knowledge. The approach is expected to be valuable because using this approach one can reason about the opportunities and changes that are associated with BPR and can incorporate prominently the issues related to change in the process of system analysis and design.