Rescuing Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises from Inefficient Information Systems--A Multi-disciplinary Method for ERP System Requirements Engineering

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems integrate companies' multiple information systems and help adapt best practices for business processes. ERP systems are in most cases off-the-shelf software packages and large by their size and complex by their structure. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) require flexibility of the ERP system because of their individual operational processes. Therefore it is crucial to select and implement an ERP system that fits the requirements of the intended target processes. To support the requirements engineering of ERP systems, we have developed customer-centered ERP implementation (C-CEI) method. The method introduces a multi-disciplinary approach to the ERP project, and provides in-depth understanding of the company's processes and context of use. Using C-CEI method decreases the risk of SMEs to select an inappropriate system, and improves the system acceptance by the customer company's employees. In this paper we present the method and illustrate it by three SME case studies