Defining value-based objectives for ERP systems planning

a r t i c l e i n f o The planning and subsequent implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems still present a significant challenge for most organizations. Although consulting firms and customer enterprises have been aquiring more experience and expertise in the field, the level of sophistication of these systems and their wide organizational and social impact frequently leads to failed ERP implementations. In an attempt to minimize these failure rates, this paper defines a set of value-based objectives that could be used to enrich the ERP systems planning process. ERP systems planning objectives grounded by stakeholder values can be used as a conceptual guide for enhancing the decision making processes involved in ERP projects. Using Keeney's value-focused thinking approach, a set of means and fundamental objectives was identified using data collected via in-depth interviews in three large European firms. The relationships and interdependancies among these objectives are also presented and provide a starting point for further research. ERP software promises significant benefits to organizations. Some of these benefits include lowering costs, reducing inventories, increasing productivity [39], improving operational efficiency [6,20], attaining competitive advantage [4], and bettering the reorganization of internal resources [51]. However, even with these reported benefits , the level of overall success for ERP projects has oftentimes been questioned [42,48]. For example, Kwahk and Lee [29] have estimated failure rates above 60% for ERP projects. The literature suggests that one notable reason for these high failure rates is the lack of organizations being able to properly align existing business processes with packaged ERP processes [57,59]. This paper argues that to ensure successful alignment [3] between organizational and ERP processes, a rich and exhaustive set of objectives that truly represent the stakeholder values of the enterprise must first be identified. While the literature agrees with the notion that ERP objectives are in fact an important critical success factor [1,2,23,32], it falls short of proposing clear, value-driven objectives and how they could be articulated for a given organizational context. Hence, the goal of this research is to create a rich set of objectives for enriching the ERP systems planning process where the ultimate aspiration is to minimize ERP failure rates in organizations. To develop these objectives, data from 3 ERP implementation case studies were analyzed. Methodologically, this study is grounded in Keeney's value-focused thinking (VFT) approach [26]. Keeney [27] argues that for a given decision context, …