The Use of Experts Panels in ERP Cost Estimation Research

This chapter is an effort towards illustrating the use of expert panels (EP) as a means of eliciting knowledge from a group of enterprise resource planning (ERP) experts in an exploratory research. The development of a cost estimation model for ERP adoptions is very crucial for research and practice, and that was the main reason behind the willingness of experts to participate in this research. The use of EP was very beneficial as it involved various data collection and visualization techniques, as well as data validation and confirmation. Arguments for using EP over other group techniques are presented in this chapter. Experts modified and enhanced the initial cost drivers list and their sub-factors significantly, as they added, modified, merged and split different costs. Moreover, they ranked the cost drivers according to their weight on total costs. All of this helped the authors to better understand relationships among various cost factors.