20 th Australasian Conference on Information Systems ERP Systems and User Performance 2-4 Dec 2009, Melbourne Abugabah & Sanzogni. 820 Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) and User Performance: A Literature Review Ahed Abugabah Griffith Business School Griffith University , Nathan Brisbane, Australia Email: a.abugabah@griffith.edu.au Louis Sanzogni Griffith Business School Griffith University, Nathan Brisbane, Australia Email: l.sanzogni@griffith.edu.a u ABSTRACT Organizations spend billions of dollars and countless hours implementing Enterprise Resources Planning systems (ERPs) to attain better performance. However, the failure rate of ERP implementation is very high, with subsequent research interests focussing mainly on understanding the failure factors. With the spotlight of prior research mainly focussed on success and failure factors other important aspects have not been given enough attention. This paper starts from the proposition that users can evaluate the benefits of the ERP systems and users can judge whether or not ERPs provide reasonable payoff and outcomes for organizations. This premise is based on the view that the user creates the benefits through the accomplishment of tasks leading to the achievement of goals. The study consists of comprehensive literature review bringing to light previous investigations on the impacts of ERP on user performance and presents how ERP research utilises IS theory to investigate ERP in different settings. Keywords: ERP systems, success factors, user performance INTRODUCTION The growth of ICT and Information Systems (IS) coupled with the needs for Innovation and Sustainability have increased the pace need for high quality and efficient performance in organizations (Al-Mashari 2003). In view of the fact that ISs have been described and recognized by modern organizations as offering a remarkable potential for improving performance (Kimaro and Nhampossa 2005: Arunthari, 2005). ERP systems have been one of the most significant systems in recent times and play a large supporting role in most of the major industries including airlines, telecommunications, transport, education government, etc (Judith 2005: Mehlinger 2006; Garcıa-Sanchezand and Perez-Bernal 2007). These systems are implemented with the belief that they will lead to better performance (Eric et al. 2007) by facilitating organizational operations and supporting various organizational goals to achieve more efficiency and effectiveness. ERPs certainly help (in principle) address the problem of fragmentations of information or “Islands of information” in business organizations. However, debate still exists regarding the various contribution of the ERP systems to performance, especially at the user level, where the core values of IS are represented and the actual benefits and impacts are created. Although ERPs are being used widely all around the world, they bring along many problems as well as benefits. Most of the implementations represent failures and/or inadequate adoption of ERPs. This signifies just one of the failure factors (Botta-Genoulaz and Millet 2006) and suggests that ERPs, their impact and outcomes should be investigated from different perspectives especially with a view to study how the human factor influences success and how users can improve ERPs performance significantly. As stated in the abstract, a large amount of research has been conducted concerning ERPs failure factors (Hongnd Kim 2002; Jawahar 2002; Zhang et al. 2005).