Customer requirements based ERP customization using AHP technique

INTRODUCTION An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can be considered as a solution for enterprises to standardize their business processes. Many organizations invest in ERP under the assumption that the implemented ERP system will deal with their interrelated business goals, such as achieving their financial targets quicker, managing and streamlining their operational processes, and improving their business forecasting. For individual companies, however, the implementation of ERP systems involves great challenges, and reaping the benefits from ERP is far from straightforward (Schubert and Williamson, 2011; Eckartz et al., 2012). Any successful ERP implementation requires a complete fit between the ERP system and the business processes it supports (Rotheberger et al. A major roadblock in for many ERP-adopting organizations to realize the benefits of ERP is the customization of the built-in business process logic and functionality of the package (Momoh et al., 2010). In this paper, the term 'customization' refers to changes or additions to the functionality available in the standard ERP software (Light, 2001). It does not mean the 'switching on and off' of functionality that is available in the package, which is sometimes called 'ERP system configuration' (Keller and Teufel, 1998). The objective of customization in ERP implementations is to achieve a fit between the ERP system and the business processes that the system supports. Past research studies on ERP projects reveal that companies should be extremely careful with ERP customization. The reason is that both over-customization and under-customization pose a variety of risks to ERP implementation. Over-customization usually results in an ERP system with a reduced degree of functional integration and, in turn, has an increased risk of failure to reap the full benefits of this packaged software (Ghost et 2 yields an ERP solution that is inflexible to the implementing enterprise and does not meet all of their business requirements (Zach et al. For the ERP implementation team to be able to make well-grounded decisions on the degree of customization for the ERP system, they need to explore and evaluate the different ERP customization choices (Rotheberger et al. been proposed to help with ERP customization evaluation, most of them treat customization from a business-IT alignment perspective, from an organizational theory perspective, or from a technical/code level perspective. In this paper, building upon published research, we design a new ERP customization framework for evaluating ERP implementation choices from the requirements engineering perspective. Taking the customer's requirements as the starting …