Preventing enterprise resource planning failure through an enhanced approach to solve ineffective communication

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a widely known type of software that eases the managerial aspect in enterprises. It increases their efficiency and productivity which helps them to exponentially grow in a short span of time compared to organizations that are not using it. However, as much as productive it is, implementing it does not often succeed. Majority of ERP implementations ends up failing due to different types of factors. Spotting the light on technical aspects showed that several factors contribute to this failure. Starting from pre-implementation phase with Business Process Reengineering (BPR) execution failure, or during the implementation phase due to miscommunication or incapable project members. The research amount in this field, particularly in critical failure factors is not sufficient to learn from and avoid future implementations, hence this topic provides insights about this specific issue. Quantitative method is used to analyse the data collected from a survey questionnaire for those who got involved in ERP or BPR implementations. The research process goes through objectives from problem identification to an in-detail explanation about its causes and effects, to how it is going to be addressed, how the data is going to be collected and analysed, and finally the proposed approach with a technical evaluation for it. The final objective of the research results in developing an approach that minimises the negative contribution of two failure factors, poor BPR and ineffective communication on the mentioned implementations, or prevent them entirely. The reason these two were chosen were due to their high occurrence frequency and lack of research regarding why they are considered failure factors. Concluding the research, the mentioned enhanced approach is being evaluated showing its potential to solve these factors, as they are relying on each other, with additional suggestions to further improve the approach in future work.