Intelligent System Design for Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Enterprise Systems Flexibility

This paper presents an empirical study to examine the relationship between Enterprise Systems (ES) flexibility, and competitive advantage by presuming ES usage as the intermediate variable. The study responses are from 296 respondents from eight industrial sectors. To gain more insight into a construct, its dimensions were considered. A fuzzy scale table was used to explain the dimensions in terms of possibility values. Each respondent used this table as a guideline to respond to each item in the questionnaire. The data analysis validates the relationship between ES flexibility, and competitive advantage and thus confirms the hypothesis that competitive advantage can be achieved through ES flexibility and usage. With the intelligence gained through empirically collected data, a system is designed to understand the causal effects. The elements of the intelligence system are fuzzy rules and fuzzy relation matrices to explain the relationship between cause and effect variables.