A client-benefits oriented taxonomy of ERP maintenance

Abstract

The worldwide installed base of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems has increased rapidly in size over the past 10 years now comprising tens of thousands of installations in large- and medium-sized organizations and millions of licensed users. Similar to traditional Information Systems (IS), ERP systems must be maintained and upgraded. It is therefore not surprising that EPP maintenance activities have become the largest budget provision in the IS departments of ERP-adopting organizations. Yet, there has been very limited study conducted on ERP maintenance activities. Are they simply instances of traditional software maintenance activities to which traditional software maintenance research findings can be generalized? Or are they fundamentally different activities, such that new research, specific to ERP maintenance, is required to help alleviate the ERP maintenance burden? This paper reports a case study of a large organization that implemented ERP (an SAP system) two years ago. From the case study and data collected, we observe that (1) an ERP-employing organization does not only maintain user change request but also implement maintenance introduced by the vendor; (2) request for user-support. concerning the ERP system usage, and training constitutes a main part of ERP maintenance activities; and (3) configuration is a major ERP maintenance component. We find that ERP maintenance activities are indeed different from traditional in-house software maintenance in a way that these maintenance activities cannot be sufficiently described by existing taxonomies used to classify traditional software maintenance activities. We propose a benefits-oriented taxonomy that better represents ERP enhancement maintenance activities.