Abstract:

Most companies nowadays, from almost all industries worldwide, use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support their business. Because of their importance, there is no doubt that the knowledge and skills of using ERP system are among necessary competences of graduates in the field of economics and business, for achieving a competitive position in the labour market. Based on that, in the past few years, selected topics of ERP solutions have become an integrative part in curricula in the economics and business studies.

Despite the recognized importance of the ERP systems as a business management tool within companies and the importance of this knowledge for graduates, it is challenging to teach such a complex information system. Students of economics and business study programs have difficulties in understanding how these solutions work and how business logic is implemented in them. The primary purpose of these solutions is that they support most of the daily business processes in the company. This means that students need to know and understand how business processes are going in the company to understand and be able to use an ERP system on an everyday basis. This is where the problem arises because most of the full-time students have no practical experience with the business of the company and do not know how the business processes in the company look like. However, the profile of future economists needs to be able to work with the ERP system at the end of their higher education. This is a challenge for the teachers of these subjects because, in addition to learning how to use the particular ERP system, they have to learn students' basics of business processes in the company.

Since knowledge of using ERP system and business processes behind them is essential for future economists, teachers want students to learn as much as possible when it comes to a particular ERP system. There are several factors on which depends on whether students will accept to learn these solutions.

The main objective of our paper is, therefore, the identification of important factors that contribute to the acceptance of ERP solutions by students in economics and business and that shape their intentions to use this knowledge in the future. The conceptual model of our research is based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which is widely used for technology adoption research. Based on this model, we have prepared a model for teaching acceptance of the particular ERP solution, where we have added external factors (obtained through literature review) that influence the learning acceptance of the ERP solution. We tested our conceptual model in 2018 on a generation of economics students in Croatia (n = 172). In 2019, we surveyed the generation of economics students (n = 185) at one of the faculties of economics in Slovenia. We chose this faculty because of the comparability of study programs; students are learning the same ERP system - Microsoft Dynamics NAV, have a similar number of contact hours and have a very similar curriculum. The article will present a comparison between the two samples.

With this secondary research, we want to confirm the results we got in 2018 on another sample and in another country. Paper is answering on the research question: What factors do teachers need to place greater emphasis on, in teaching ERP solutions to make students more accepting of learning ERP solutions?

Keywords:

ERP solutions, TAM, economics and business’ graduates, acceptance model.