Software as a service in cloud based ERP change management

Abstract

Cloud based technology heavily changed the way how Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are handled through the whole lifecycle. The previous release-by-release driven by main version change (from pre-alpha to gold release) was developed into a continuous release management. Business processes although remained the same, but how can be determined, which part of the software needs to remain untouched, while evolving to continuous lifecycle support. One of the key questions is to ensure the continuous reliability of the software product. Due to the sudden change and improvement, this type of lifecycle management can be described as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type methodology. As from the current implementations, this process does not necessarily leads to a Business Process Reengineering (BPR). This paper introduces change management methodology applied to a specific ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics AX business process lifecycle maintenance implementation project. This approach seems to be suitable for supporting the long term sustainability of the software product.