Impact of critical success factors on successful technology implementation in Consumer Pack- aged Goods (CPG) supply chain

Article history: Received: October 1, 2016 Received in revised format: November 16, 2016 Accepted: February 15, 2017 Available online: February 15, 2017 The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the impact of critical success factors (CSFs) impacting technology implementation in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) supply chain. The study has used existing literature to identify CSFs and then questionnaire-based survey and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to group CSFs. The paper has revealed that “Inter-Organizational”, “Organizational”, “CPG Sector Specific”, “Human” and “Program Management” CSFs impact successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain. The paper fills the gap in existing literature by studying the impact of CSFs on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain and providing guidance to practitioners working in CPG sector. © 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
CPG organizations need to provide wide range of options along with keeping abreast with the changing consumer needs and business scenario (Noorani et al., 2007).CPG organizations are under constant pressure to launch efficient and effective new product innovations (Noorani et al., 2007;Søndergaard et al., 2007) and promotional campaigns (Tang et al., 2014).In order to be competitive in this global environment, CPG organizations have realized the importance of supply chain (Zokaei et al., 2007;Sahay et al., 2002).Organizations need to invest in enabling infrastructure (Marien, 2000) and technology (Sahay et al., 2003) to realize supply chain vision into reality.Technology has become an enabler for an organization's supply chain instead of a weapon of competition (Hong, 2002).Disappointing outcomes of technology investment pose a serious challenge (Kim et al., 2006) along with slow adoption of technology in supply chain (Johnston et al., 2000).Hence successful implementation of technology has been a matter of significant discussion.Thus, it is essential for organizations to focus on CSFs and understand the impact of these CSFs on successful technology implementation.The literature on supply chain technology implementation, didn't discuss CSFs pertaining to CPG sector.This has motivated the authors to study CSFs affecting successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain.
The objectives of this paper are to • identify CSFs from existing literature • study the impact of CSF's on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain

• recognize societal and technological impact
• suggest future research directions

Survey
A questionnaire based survey has been used to establish relationship between identified CSF's and successful technology implementation.The questionnaire was first sent to 25 respondents (Academicians working as Supply chain experts and Supply Chain & IT executives of CPG organizations) to ensure that questions were appropriate and easy to understand & respond.Based on the feedback received from 25 respondents, 3 questions were dropped and 10 questions were refined.
Questionnaire was then sent to 300 professionals working with CPG organizations at different levels of managerial responsibility.The questions were asked on a five-point Likert scale.On this scale 1 and 5 correspond to "very low importance" and "very high importance" respectively.210 professionals shared responses but 10 responses were dropped because of incompleteness.

Data Analysis
Cronbach's coefficient (α) was calculated to test the reliability and internal consistency of the responses.The value of α in this study was found to be 0.816 which is considered acceptable (Cronbach, 1951).Skewness and kurtosis are used to validate the data for normality (Bo et al., 2015).The values of more than ±1 are often taken to indicate non-normality (Hair, 2014).We can see from Scree plot (Fig. 1) and Total variance explained (Table 4) that first six factors represent most influential items.The total variance explained by 6 components is 75.8%.Table 5 represents the results of principal component analysis after Promax rotation.a.When components are correlated, sums of squared loadings cannot be added to obtain a total variance.

Result
In this section, we identify the relationship of these 6 components namely "Inter-Organizational" (I), "Organizational" (O), "CPG Sector Specific" (C), "Human" (H), "Technology" (T) and "Program Management" (P) on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain.Based on the survey and statistical test conducted, it is suggested that Implementation Success= .301+.304(I) + .299(O) + .179(C) + .177(H) + .137(P) The model suggests that I, O, C, P and H have significant impact on technology implementation at 95% significant level and T doesn't have significant impact on technology implementation.The details of our finding, is depicted in table 6 and summary of the results in Table 7.

Discussion on findings
From the results obtained, it is found that "Organizational", "Inter-Organizational", "Human" and "Program Management" CSFs will have positive impact on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain.This is well supported by previous studies done in other industries which states that successful technology implementation requires a committed organization (Hammant, 1997) along with the support from top management (Kotzab et al., 2003;Favilla et al., 2005;Jharkharia et al., 2005) and a sustainable change management system (Bozarth, 2006).Trust between supply chain partners is essential for a successful technology implementation (Laeequddin et al., 2012;Anbanandam et al., 2011;Kotzab et al., 2003).Supply chain technology implementation seem to succeed or fail on the degree of resource sharing (information, knowledge & skills) along with the partner's ability to use these resources effectively in the changing environments (Stanley, 2008;Jharkharia et al., 2005).
Employees play a major role in the implementation (Shaaban et al., 2014) along with expertise of implementation consultants (McMullan, 1996).Employees should understand the rationale for implementation (Garg et al., 2013) along with getting proper training.It is also important to have preparedness for Business Process Reengineering (Favilla et al., 2005) along with using a proven implementation methodology (Favilla et al., 2005), effective governance, program management & risk-mitigation strategy during implementation (Hammant, 1997).
One of the major findings of this study is the positive impact of "CPG Sector Specific" CSF on successful technology implementation.The findings highlight that a) Gaining competitive advantage b) Peer Pressure c) Involvement of marketing team during planning phase and d) focus on Consumer, positively impacts technology implementation.The impact of this CSF has not been studied earlier and this is the first of its kind study which has focused on this CSF along with other CSFs.
The last finding of this study states that "Technology" CSF will not have significant positive impact on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain.Though, the earlier studies in other sectors have emphasized that implementation success depends on choosing the right technology & product for the organization (Annamalai et al., 2013) along with information security framework (Borade et al., 2010).

Conclusion and Implication
The main findings of this research in line with the stated objectives are  24 CSFs have been identified from existing literature and then grouped into 6 using factor analysis  fills the gap in existing literature by focusing on CPG sector as the previous research work in this field lacked focus on CPG sector  "Inter-Organizational" CSF has higher and more significant impact, followed by "Organizational", "CPG sector specific", "Human" and "Program Management" CSFs on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain  emphasized the positive impact of "CPG sector specific" CSF on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain  "Technology" CSF doesn't have a significant impact on successful technology implementation in CPG supply chain The integrated approach suggested practitioners to concentrate on both softer aspects ("Organizational", "Inter-Organizational", "Human", and "Program Management") along with "CPG sector specific" CSF which will help in delivering enhanced outcomes and improved performance.It also provides guidance to managers by focusing on high priority CSFs "Inter-Organizational", "Organizational", "CPG sector specific" and "Human" (in order of priority from high to low).
The proposed study has some limitations which can be undertaken in future research.Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) can be applied to further test the validity of this model.This research has been done for CPG sector and similar research needs to be done for other sectors.

Table 1
Critical Success Factors (CSFs) Table 2 presents basic statistics including min, max, standard deviation, Skewness and Kurtosis.The values were well within desirable levels and principle component analysis needs to be used to extract the main factors.
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was done to identify the underlying relationships between CSFs.Table3presents Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's test results.KMO is coming to 0.812 and results are statistically significant. Further

Table 3
KMO and Bartlett's Test

Table 4
Total variance explained

Table 5
Pattern Matrix (Principal Component Analysis after Promax rotation) Preparedness for business process reengineering'.The fourth CSF " Human" pertains to factors involving employees and includes 'Involvement of Employees/ endusers during implementation stage', ' Proper training of end-users', ' Assurance of job security for employees post IT implementation' and ' Competence of the project team'.The fifth CSF "Technology" extracted from Factor Analysis includes 'Proper information security', 'Selecting the right supply chain package' and 'Data Management'.The sixth component " CPG Sector Specific" pertains to CPG related parameters and includes 'Gaining competitive advantage', ' Peer Pressure', ' Involvement of Marketing team during planning phase' and ' Focus on Consumer'.Finally, the relationship of these 6 CSFs on successful technology implementation needs to be identified.
Based on this, 24 CSFs have been divided into 6 components as depicted in Figure2.The first CSF extracted from Factor Analysis is "Organizational" and includes 'Top Management Support', 'Organization's willingness and commitment', 'Alignment between IT and business objectives', 'Proper IT investment justifications' and 'Change management initiatives'.The second CSF "Inter-Organizational" extracted from Factor Analysis pertains to supply chain partner parameters, and includes 'Trust', 'Cooperation and commitment', 'Cultural alignment', 'Investment in IT infrastructure' and 'Dynamic information sharing model' between supply chain partners.The third CSF "Program Management" extracted from Factor Analysis includes 'Effective governance and program management', 'Effective risk mitigation strategy' and '

Table 7
Impact of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) on successful technology implementation "Organizational" CSF's will have positive impact on successful implementation of technology in CPG supply chain