An Empirical Study on the Development of a Hierarchical Model for Effects Factors of EDI systems

EDI 효과요인의 계층적 모델 개발에 관한 실증적 연구

For the past decade, although there have been many studies which examined factors influencing the extent of EDI systems implementation, it is very hard to find out studies which directly investigated what the effectiveness of EDI systems are, and which factors contribute to the successful implementation of EDI systems. In this regard, this research aims to explore for the factors which constitute the effectiveness of EDI systems as perceived, based on a survey from 202 companies. The major steps of the current research are as follows. First, in order to identify important factors constituting the effectiveness of EDI systems, previous research related to the effectiveness of EDI systems was reviewed and analyzed. Second, individual items which can be considered as candidates to represent the effectiveness of EDI systems were derived from this previous research review, and a survey questionnaire was developed using those derived items. Based on the developed survey questionnaire, a pretest was administered at several domestic business firms with experiences of EDI systems. Third, survey questionnaires were distributed to and collected from the 202 companies which experienced EDI implementation. Accordingly, this research derived out five factors constituting the effectiveness of EDI systems from the result of a multivariate data analysis: strategic advantage, time reduction in business process, accuracy improvement, cost reduction, and improvement of business process quality. It was also interesting to find that the factors of EDI effectiveness are divided into three levels, similarly to three levels of the Anthony's hierarchical model of organization(Anthony, 1965): strategic, managerial, and operational levels. Furthermore, from the levels of derived factors, we developed a conceptual model which explains the possible causal relations of those factors in a hierarchical manner.