Critical success factors in ERP implementation: A review

ERP systems have become vital strategic tools in today’s competitive business environment. This ongoing research study presents a review of recent research work in ERP systems. It attempts to identify the main benefits of ERP systems, the drawbacks and the critical success factors for implementation discussed in the relevant literature. The findings revealed that despite some organizations have faced challenges undertaking ERP implementations, many others have enjoyed the benefits that the systems have brought to the organizations. ERP system facilitates the smooth flow of common functional information and practices across the entire organization. In addition, it improves the performance of the supply chain and reduces the cycle times. However, without top management support, having appropriate business plan and vision, re-engineering business process, effective project management, user involvement and education and training, organizations can not embrace the full benefits of such complex system and the risk of failure might be at high level

Requirements analysis in the implementation of integrated PLM, ERP and CAD systems

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system implementation is a major investment when the technology is used in manufacturing companies. This paper provides an analysis of the requirements for the integration of PLM systems with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems incorporating the design aspects of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) within the product development process. PLM implementation deals with various existing product data and information generated over years both from CAD and ERP systems. Data integration is very challenging and has important impact on future decisions while creating new processes. The information management plays very important role not only in PLM implementation but also in the way this will be used in future production. Therefore it is very important to analyse how product information is transferred to PLM system. It also need to be investigated that what, when and how the data will flow from and to PLM systems

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

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

The relevance of specific csfs for stakeholders during ERP implementation: an empirical study from Oman

The success of ERP systems implementation is affected by the extent to which stakeholders have been prepared for the project activities and its outcomes. Stakeholders’ preparation needs change as the ERP implementation lifecycle progresses and varies across stakeholder groups. Therefore a dynamic model is needed for such preparation. However such a model needs to reflect the relevance of different CSFs to different stakeholder groups at different stages of the ERP implementation life-cycle. This study examines empirical evidence from a survey conducted in Omani organisations to determine what these individual CSFs are and how they are distributed across the ERP implementation life-cycle for different stakeholder groups. The CSFs included in the survey were derived from a structured review of literature. Purposive sampling was used to select respondents representing different ERP stakeholders groups, all respondents had both experience and knowledge of ERP implementations. The survey data are analysed and the distribution of relevant CSFs across the ERP lifecycle for the different stakeholder groups are presente

Identifying critical success factors of ERP systems at the higher education sector

In response to a range of contextual drivers, the worldwide adoption of ERP Systems in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has increased substantially over the past decade. Though the difficulties and high failure rate in implementing ERP systems at university environments have been cited in the literature, research on critical success factors (CSFs) for ERP implementations in this context is rare and fragmented. This paper is part of a larger research effort that aims to contribute to understanding the phenomenon of ERP implementations and evaluations in HEIs in the Australasian region; it identifies, previously reported, critical success factors (CSFs) in relation to ERP system implementations and discusses the importance of these factors

Product to process lifecycle management in assembly automation systems

Presently, the automotive industry is facing enormous pressure due to global competition and ever changing legislative, economic and customer demands. Product and process development in the automotive manufacturing industry is a challenging task for many reasons. Current product life cycle management (PLM) systems tend to be product-focussed. Though, information about processes and resources are there but mostly linked to the product. Process is an important aspect, especially in assembly automation systems that link products to their manufacturing resources. This paper presents a process-centric approach to improve PLM systems in large-scale manufacturing companies, especially in the powertrain sector of the automotive industry. The idea is to integrate the information related to key engineering chains i.e. products, processes and resources based upon PLM philosophy and shift the trend of product-focussed lifecycle management to process-focussed lifecycle management, the outcome of which is the Product, Process and Resource Lifecycle Management not PLM only