Adapting American ERP systems for China: Cross-cultural issues and a case study

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems currently used by American businesses are unsuitable for adoption by small and medium size Chinese businesses. Cross-cultural issues include not only the obvious localization and interface language differences but also bearable implementation costs, culturally-specific management styles, and financial report format discrepancies. This paper discusses the cross-cultural issues that must be addressed to bridge the gap between American and Chinese ERP systems and presents a case study of an ERP system designed using scrum, an agile software engineering methodology, to meet this need.