Purpose – This paper
aims to revisit the adoption reasons of enterprise systems (ES) and
supply chain management systems (SCMS) and to explore the new dimensions
of sustainability required to be added in the whole process of adoption
of these systems. Moreover, it aims to explore the benefits of ES to
organizations and to relate these benefits to the ES adoption in future
sustainable city settings. Future cities will have micro-industries
requiring dynamic interactions and will be dependent on efficient supply
chains. The recent developments in information and communications
technology (ICT) such as cloud computing through its dynamic, on-demand
and service-based delivery are making it possible to achieve those goals
for supply chains. The ES in general and more specifically SCMS have
integrated organizations into one seamless mesh.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a framework for
adoption of sustainable ES in a smart city setting. The framework,
firstly, is presented at a macro-level, particularly incorporating the
relative significance of motivational factors for sustainable ES
adoption. Subsequently, The authors study the benefits of ES as
perceived by large and small and medium enterprise (SME) organizations
using 100 case studies and discuss how these benefits can be realized
for smart cities by projecting the ES benefits onto the proposed
framework. The benefits are estimated with the Shang and Seddon’s (2002)
framework. Findings – The adoption of ES initiated with environmental
factors and mediated with business and technical factors will bring
benefits in all the dimensions of triple bottom line in addition to the
firm’s performance. ES will have pivotal role in future smart city
settings and will be able to offer social, environmental and economic
sustainability in addition to traditional organizational performance
indicators. Originality/value – The proposed framework for ES adoption
will bring ES packages (particularly, the required relative significance
of adoption reasons) into the perspective of sustainable development.
Moreover, the study of its benefits in relation to the proposed
sustainable ES adoption framework presented in this paper will help in
motivating organizations to incorporate social, economic and
environmental sustainability into their core business objectives. ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Enterprise systems; Firm’s performance; Supply chain management; Sustainable supply chains; Triple bottom line