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In the last years the penetration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems within small, medium and large organizations increased steadily. Organizations are forced to adapt their systems and perform ERP upgrades in order to react to rapidly changing business environments, technological enhancements and rising pressure of competition. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the critical success factors for such projects.

The paper is based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with CEOs, CIOs, ERP consultants and project managers who recently carried out ERP upgrade projects in their respective organizations.

This paper identifies 14 critical success factors for ERP upgrade projects. Amongst others, effective project management, external support, the composition of the ERP team and the usage of a multiple system landscape play a key role for the success of the ERP upgrade. Furthermore, a comparison to the critical success factors for ERP implementation projects was conducted, and even though there are many similarities between these types of projects, several differences emerged.

ERP upgrade projects have a huge impact on organizations, but their success and antecedents for it are currently under-researched.

This paper examines the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of 27 European central governments and the governments' respective information technology (IT) reforms, facilitator role and association with accrual accounting reforms as premise of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS).

This paper presents a qualitative and content analysis of 27 European Union (EU) member states (MSs) regarding the states' IT and accounting maturity in association with accrual accounting as breeding ground for IPSAS convergence based on published surveys on behalf of Eurostat, web data and emails collected from authorized officials.

This paper has found that (1) increased accounting and IT maturity scores of central governments are associated with the establishment or upgrade of ERP systems; (2) ERP systems prove to facilitate and support accrual accounting adoption; (3) in majority, EU MSs adopt similar ERP vendors to implement accrual accounting reforms; (4) with prevalence among ERP vendors, the Systems Application Products (SAP) ERP software proves to be a success story toward public sector accounting (PSA) reforms.

Respective information on the ERP systems' facilitation to financial accounting reforms is collected only for 17 central governments.

This paper highlights the facilitation of ERP systems as reform drivers to accrual accounting change of EU MSs, through IT modernization. This paper links the ERP practices with specific ERP vendors pointing out the vendors' similarities. This paper presents examples of European ERP reforms and sets the reforms as reference for central governments that wish to embark on ERP and accrual accounting reforms.

Enterprise systems (ES) upgrade is a complex undertaking that recurs throughout the systems’ life span, therefore, organisations need to adopt strategies and methodologies that can minimise disruptions and risks associated with upgrades. The purpose of this paper is to explore the processes undertaken during upgrading ES, to identify the upgrade project stages.

This research is grounded in a qualitative survey approach, and utilises a web-based survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews as methods for data collection. The data were gathered from 41 respondents’ and analysed using qualitatively inductive content analysis principles to derive meaning and to identify the trends about upgrade processes.

The study findings stress the importance of adopting a methodical approach to ES upgrades. Also, it suggests that due consideration should be given to the impact of new version features and functionality, the risks and the effort required for supporting upgrade projects.

The five-stage upgrade process model can be utilised as a strategy to minimise complexity and risks associated with upgrade projects. However, this study only proposes logical generalisations; therefore, future studies could explore these stages in-depth to offer generalisable arguments applicable to ES upgrade phenomenon.

The study proposes a five-stage upgrade process model that offers a systematic approach to support upgrade projects. The proposed model extends previous models by proposing alternative strategies to support ES upgrade projects.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) went through many development cycles since its beginning in the 1970s until it established itself as a backbone of most major enterprises in the world. In spite of its countless advantages, most ERP implementations require heavy customisation to achieve their proclaimed advantages. This paper represents an endeavour to investigate, through a case study, the feasibility of minimising the heavy customisation required by most ERP implementations by selecting the best modules from each vendor and integrating them using enterprise application integration technologies, to form one (integrated) system. In doing so, the paper provides a description of a way to implement a suggested integrated solution, as well as a discussion of how minimising customisation enables enterprises to upgrade their ERP software effortlessly and cost‐effectively.

Enterprise systems (ES) upgrade is a complex phenomenon, yet it is possible to reduce the complexity through understanding of the upgrade drivers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the various upgrade drivers, in order to provide a detailed understanding of the factors driving upgrade decisions.

This research is grounded in a qualitative survey design. It utilises a web-based survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data from 41 respondents representing 23 large organisations. The data were qualitatively analysed and coded to identify the various drivers and their influence on ES upgrade decisions.

The findings suggest that the upgrade decisions are dependent on establishing the need to upgrade, which is influenced by various drivers and stakeholders interests. In addition, the findings suggest that organisations would only opt to upgrade when benefits are aligned with the upgrade and when the decision makes business sense.

In this paper, the authors propose that there is a relationship between the upgrade drivers and the upgrade strategy. However, qualitative studies can only formulate logical generalisations. Hence, future research could explore these associations through a quantitative study in order to provide probabilistic generalisation that offers either similar or conflicting arguments applicable to ES upgrade phenomenon.

This paper provides an alternative classification of upgrade drivers, and conceptualises an association between upgrade drivers and the upgrade strategy, which in turn facilitates minimising disruptions and upgrade risks.

To review an existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) literature and provide the inter‐organizational practice of ERP system.

A focus group (FG) method was adopted as an exploratory means to gain insights and perspective of ERP systems.

The study suggests researchers re‐examine the following ERP issues at the inter‐organizational level, namely: selection of ERP packages, integration of business processes, knowledge and applications, implementation approaches, training as well as organizational transformation and software migration.

The study examined the different ERP lifecycle phases and provided the insight factors that were crucial to overall success in implementing ERP. In addition, the empirical findings would be useful to ERP practitioners by providing better understanding of ERP from both the user and organizational perspectives. Regarding the FG methodology, practitioners can use FG at the beginning of ERP projects to gather customer needs and organizational information, which can facilitate better business and IS planning.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative integrated approach based on the stage-gate method to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems which will enhance the effectiveness of ERP projects.

A literature review was conducted on ERP system implementation and its effectiveness. The need for improving implementation approaches and methodologies was examined. Based on the insights gained, a conceptual framework for ERP system implementation is presented by combining the state-gate approach with the pre-implementation roadmap.

The proposed framework aims to enhance the overall ERP implementation outcomes, ensuring critical success factors and eliminating common causes of failures. A pre-implementation roadmap is identified as a key element for eliminating many causes of failure including lack of organisations’ readiness for ERP. The post-implementation stage can be used for further improvements to the system through internal research and development.

The development of the framework is an attempt to contribute to improving ERP implementation. This research is expected to motivate researchers to work in this area, and it will be beneficial to practicing managers in the identification of opportunities for improvements in ERP systems. Case studies will be valuable to refine and validate the proposed model.

This paper explores research in a needy area and offers a framework to help researchers and practitioners in improving ERP implementation. This framework is expected to reduce the implementation project duration, strengthen critical success factors and minimise common problems of ERP implementation projects.

This article provides a brief review of current literature on ERP and its implementation in industries. To fully understand the ERP software key points, risks, benefits, critical success factors, implementation issues, and the fundamental on that are identified and reviewed. Some applications of ERP in public places, government offices, and industries are briefly discussed and four related cases are reviewed.

Provides a background on enterprise resource planning implementation, key elements of ERP, and review four important cases from the literature in that regard. To better introduce ERP software to new users the risks and benefits of that are discussed in item lists and each are described briefly.

Pointed to key benefits and risks of enterprise resource systems software and studies four cases from the literature related to the ERP implementation.

Due to the fact that a better management of a system is related to the full understanding of the technologies implemented and the system under consideration, sufficient background on the enterprise resource planning is provided. The lack of research papers and conceptual papers related to risk‐benefit analysis of ERP systems is a motivation for conducting this research.

Enterprise systems (ES) upgrade is fundamental to maintaining a system’s continuous improvement and stability. However, while the extant literature is replete with research on ES upgrade decision-making, there is scant knowledge about how different decision processes facilitate this decision to upgrade. This paper aims to investigate and better understand these processes from an organisational perspective.

The study adopted a qualitative survey design, and used a Web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data from 23 large organisations. Data accrued were qualitatively analysed and manually coded to identify the various decision processes undertaken during ES upgrade decisions.

Analysis results reveal complex interrelations between the upgrade drivers, the need to evaluate the new version’s functionality and the upgrade impact. Understanding the interaction between these elements influences the upgrade decision process.

The study proposes ES upgrade processes that support a decision to upgrade major releases. Further research is required to offer either similar or conflicting arguments on the upgrade decision-making and provide a probabilistic generalisation of the decision-making processes.

The research offers a comprehensive and empirically supported methodical approach that embraces an evaluation of a new version’s functionality, technical requirements and concomitant upgrade implications as intrinsic decision processes. This approach assists in the decisions to establish the upgrade need and determine the level of change, effort required, impacts and associated benefits.

Delivering benefits from ERP II is challenging and the purpose of this paper is to investigate the allocation of resources contributing towards benefits realisation.

A case‐study investigation was based on a five‐month placement within the project team of an organisation implementing ERP II. A critical success factors (CSF) phasing model was developed in order to categorise invested resources. Participant observations formed the first stage of the research and two years post implementation the observations were presented back to four key members of the project team to identify which invested resources contributed towards benefits realisation. Subsequently, the findings were presented to seven supplier organisations to validate the CSFs required to deliver benefits realisation from ERP II implementations.

This research has identified 19 CSFs for ERP II, contributing an additional six to those already outlined in literature. A critical pathway for ERP II implementations has been presented, allowing the identified CSFs to be tackled at the appropriate stages of the implementation.

This is the first time CSFs have been allocated to different phases of the implementation lifecycle using a structured model. As a result, resources contributing towards benefits realisation can be more effectively applied, saving the organisation valuable resources.