A case study of exploiting enterprise resource planning requirements

Abstract

The requirements engineering (RE) processes have become a key to conceptualising corporate-wide integrated solutions based on packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The RE literature has mainly focused on procuring the most suitable ERP package. Little is known about how an organisation exploits the chosen ERP RE model to frame the business application development. This article reports an exploratory case study of a key tenet of ERP RE adoption, namely that aligning business applications to the packaged RE model leads to integral practices and economic development. The case study analysed a series interrelated pilot projects developed for a business division of a large IT manufacturing and service company, using Oracle's appl1ication implementation method (AIM). The study indicated that AIM RE improved team collaboration and project management experience, but needed to make hidden assumptions explicit to support data visibility and integrity. Our study can direct researchers towards rigorous empirical evaluations of ERP RE adoption, collect experiences and lessons learned for practitioners, and help generate more effective and mature processes when exploiting ERP RE methods.

Keywords:

• enterprise resource planning
• requirements engineering
• Oracle
• application implementation method
• exploratory case study

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the management and staff at the partner company for their invaluable collaboration. We thank Robert Brassard, Jim Hoover and Steve Easterbrook for careful comments on earlier drafts of this article. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Notes

1. More than 150 templates are defined in AIM 3.0.0.

2. We realise that when using Likert-scale questions it is best to have some with inverse polarity, i.e. some questions where respondent's agreeing means that we are dissatisfied. We also realise that the current questions are stated in a relative way. This might cause biases because each respondent has to compare AIM to their prior experience and each person may have quite different prior experience. The use of absolute questions may yield data that would have less personal bias. For the above reasons, we reformulate some questions ( Appendix 1, Part 2) to guide future investigation.