A Project Approach to Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation process is a complex programming initiative with an overabundance of influencing factors that can shape its success. This paper has 2 objectives to: (I) use simple project management tools and techniques to restructure the implementation process in order to reduce the complexity (II) build a stable model that will be largely insensitive to minor perturbations. The 28 Critical Success Factors (CSFs) used in this model are partitioned into 5 special groups called roles. The restriction of the interactions to within roles resulted in a reduction of pairwise comparisons between CSFs from 378 in the unstructured process to 79 in the model. Pairwise comparisons are a measure of complexity. In addition, the rate of change of pairwise comparisons reduced from 29 in the unstructured process to a maximum of 9 and as low as 5 in the model.