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1. Introduction
Over the last few decades, businesses across industries have implemented either ERP (enterprise resource planning) or related IT (information technology) systems and/or Lean management approaches to enable continuous improvement of productivity, product quality and customer satisfaction (Nadarajah and Kadir, 2016), and achieve business process excellence and competitive advantage (Ghobakhloo and Fathi, 2019; Maguire, 2016; Powell, 2013). Lean has been used and defined in numerous ways (Arlbjørn and Freytag, 2013). In addition, Lean foundation has five principles: identifying value, mapping value streams, creating flow, establishing pull and continuous improvement (Womack and Jones, 2003). Such foundation is supported by organizational settings for pursuing a long-term philosophy of continuous improvement through people and partners, processes and continuous improvement activities (Liker, 2004).
ERP systems (Davenport, 1998) digitalize the information flow across functions and offer a range of functionalities supporting daily business processes by offering an infrastructure for process improvement (Masini and Wassenhove, 2009). Thus, the value of ERP resides not in the technological assets, but in the ability to develop repeatable patterns of value-creating actions using these assets (Masini and Wassenhove, 2009). Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that companies able to combine and integrate Lean and ERP as complementary initiatives are more likely to achieve operations and service excellence than businesses with independent initiatives (Erkayman, 2019; Ghobakhloo and Fathi, 2019; Chiarini and Vagnoni, 2017; Iris and Cebeci, 2014; Powell et al., 2012, 2013).
However, the existing literature concerned with combining Lean and ERP has mainly addressed manufacturing industry challenges of building continuous improvement capabilities. Many service companies in the digital economy, currently use IT (Kobus et al., 2018)/or ERP to support their operations and business processes, but lack management to fully develop their continuous improvement capacity (Gupta et al., 2016) and several studies confirm the importance of improving service operations to remain competitive (Vashishth et al., 2019). This fact calls for more research on the benefits from integrating Lean initiatives on top of ERP implementation for improving service speed, quality, etc. while remaining flexible (Gijo et al., 2019; Obwegeser et al., 2019). Consequently, we argue that process improvement capability can be raised by combining ERP and Lean, as Lean provides a systematic improvement approach and ERP can provide digital support...