Preliminary Results in a Multi-site Empirical Study on Cross-organizational ERP Size and Effort Estimation

This paper reports on initial findings in an empirical study carried out with representatives of two ERP vendors, six ERP adopting organizations, four ERP implementation consulting companies, and two ERP research and advisory services firms. Our study’s goal was to gain understanding of the state-of-the practice in size and effort estimation of cross-organizational ERP projects. Based on key size and effort estimation challenges identified in a previously published literature survey, we explored some difficulties, fallacies and pitfalls these organizations face. We focused on collecting empirical evidence from the participating ERP market players to assess specific facts about the state-of-the-art ERP size and effort estimation practices. Our study adopted a qualitative research method based on an asynchronous online focus group

Costs, Benefits and Value Distribution – Ingredients for Successful Cross-Organizational ES Business Cases

This paper introduces my PhD research project on developing guidelines for creating successful business cases for Enterprise System implementations in network settings. Three important aspects that were found to be important in such business cases are: the costs, benefits and the value distribution within a network. Each of the three aspects is addressed in this paper and the relationships between them are pointed out. A research model is presented showing how all three aspects contribute to the main goal of defining successful business case guidelines

Early Quantitative Assessment of Non-Functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are a well known source of uncertainty in effort estimation. Yet, quantitatively approaching NFR early in a project is hard. This paper makes a step towards reducing the impact of uncertainty due to NRF. It offers a solution that incorporates NFRs into the functional size quantification process. The merits of our solution are twofold: first, it lets us quantitatively assess the NFR modeling process early in the project, and second, it lets us generate test cases for NFR verification purposes. We chose the NFR framework as a vehicle to integrate NFRs into the requirements modeling process and to apply quantitative assessment procedures. Our solution proposal also rests on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. We extend its use for NFR testing purposes, which is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the advantages of our approach and the open questions related to its design as well

Data-driven through-life costing to support product lifecycle management solutions in innovative product development

Innovative product usually refers to product that comprises of creativity and new ideas. In the development of such a new product, there is often a lack of historical knowledge and data available to be used to perform cost estimation accurately. This is due to the fact that traditional cost estimation methods are used to predict costs only after a product model has been built, and not at an early design stage when there is little data and information available. In light of this, original equipment manufacturers are also facing critical challenges of becoming globally competitive and increasing demands from customer for continuous innovation. To alleviate these situations this research has identified a new approach to cost modelling with the inclusion of product lifecycle management solutions to address innovative product development.The aim of this paper, therefore, is to discuss methods of developing an extended-enterprise data-driven through-life cost estimating method for innovative product development

A systematic review of software development cost estimation studies

This paper aims to provide a basis for the improvement of software estimation research through a systematic review of previous work. The review identifies 304 software cost estimation papers in 76 journals and classifies the papers according to research topic, estimation approach, research approach, study context and data set. A web-based library of these cost estimation papers is provided to ease the identification of relevant estimation research results. The review results combined with other knowledge provide support for recommendations for future software cost estimation research, including: 1) Increase the breadth of the search for relevant studies, 2) Search manually for relevant papers within a carefully selected set of journals when completeness is essential, 3) Conduct more studies on estimation methods commonly used by the software industry, and, 4) Increase the awareness of how properties of the data sets impact the results when evaluating estimation methods

A Survey on Economic-driven Evaluations of Information Technology

The economic-driven evaluation of information technology (IT) has become an important instrument in the management of IT projects. Numerous approaches have been developed to quantify the costs of an IT investment and its assumed profit, to evaluate its impact on business process performance, and to analyze the role of IT regarding the achievement of enterprise objectives. This paper discusses approaches for evaluating IT from an economic-driven perspective. Our comparison is based on a framework distinguishing between classification criteria and evaluation criteria. The former allow for the categorization of evaluation approaches based on their similarities and differences. The latter, by contrast, represent attributes that allow to evaluate the discussed approaches. Finally, we give an example of a typical economic-driven IT evaluation

Complementing approaches in ERP effort estimation practice: an industrial study

Projects implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are characterized by specific context factors such as high level of reuse, scope of the ERP modules, interdependent functionality, and use of vendor-specific standard implementation method, all of which impose risks known to cause various degrees of project failure. We suggest a remedy to this issue by tackling it from a portfolio management perspective. Our solution rests on earlier work by other authors and is a combination of a classic cost estimation method (COCOMO II), a Monte Carlo simulation process, and a portfolio management model. We report on the results of a case study done in a company site in the telecommunication sector

New product development resource forecasting

Forecasting resource requirements for new product development (NPD) projects is essential for both strategic and tactical planning. Sophisticated, elegant planning tools to present data and inform decision-making do exist. However, in NPD, such tools run on unreliable, estimation-based resource information derived through undefined processes. This paper establishes that existing methods do not provide transparent, consistent, timely or accurate resource planning information, highlighting the need for a new approach to resource forecasting, specifically in the field of NPD. The gap between the practical issues and available methods highlights the possibility of developing a novel design of experiments approach to create resource forecasting models

Customer requirements based ERP customization using AHP technique

Purpose– Customization is a difficult task for many organizations implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new framework based on customers’ requirements to examine the ERP customization choices for the enterprise. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique has been applied complementarily with this framework to prioritize ERP customization choices. \ud \ud Design/methodology/approach– Based on empirical literature, the paper proposed an ERP customization framework anchored on the customer's requirements. A case study research method was used to evaluate the applicability of the framework in a real-life setting. In a case study with 15 practitioners working on the vendor's and the client's sides in an ERP implementation, the paper applied the framework jointly with the AHP technique to prioritize the feasible customization choices for ERP implementation. \ud \ud Findings– The paper demonstrates the applicability of the framework in identifying the various feasible choices for the client organization to consider when they decide to customize their selected ERP product. \ud \ud Research limitations/implications– Further case studies need to be carried out in various contexts to acquire knowledge about the generalizability of the observations. This will also contribute to refining the proposed ERP customization framework. \ud \ud Practical implications– Very few literature sources suggest methods for exploring and evaluating customization options in ERP projects from requirements engineering perspective. The proposed framework helps practitioners and consultants anchor the customization decisions on the customer's requirements and use a well-established prioritization technique, AHP, to identify the feasible customization choices for the implementing enterprise. \ud \ud Originality/value– No previously published research studies provide an approach to prioritize customization choices for ERP anchored on the customer's requirements