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6 - Risk Factors in Enterprise-wide/ERP Projects

from Part II - From Risks to Critical Success Factors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2012

By
Mary Sumner
Edited by
Graeme Shanks ,
Peter B. Seddon  and
Leslie P. Willcocks
Mary Sumner
Affiliation:
Directs the undergraduate program in Management Information Systems, Southern Illinois University
Graeme Shanks
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Peter B. Seddon
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Leslie P. Willcocks
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

Risk Factors in Enterprise-wide/ERP Projects

In the past several years many organizations have initiated enterprise-wide/ ERP projects, using such packages as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. These projects often represent the single largest investment in an information systems project in the history of these companies, and in many cases the largest single investment in any corporate-wide project.

These enterprise-wide/ERP projects bring about a host of new questions, because they represent a new type of management challenge. The management approaches for these projects may be altogether different from the managerial approaches for traditional MIS projects. Some of these questions and issues are:

  • What are the major risk factors associated with implementing traditional MIS projects?

  • What are the major risk factors associated with enterprise-wide information management projects?

What are the differences? What new risk factors need to be addressed in ERP projects? What are some of the risks in ERP projects that are not factors in non-ERP projects?

Most organizations have extensive experience managing traditional MIS projects, but these new ERP projects may represent new challenges and present new risk factors that must be handled differently. This paper will provide case studies of seven organizations implementing enterprise-wide/ERP projects and will provide insight into each of these questions based upon their experiences.

Type
Chapter
Information
Second-Wave Enterprise Resource Planning Systems
Implementing for Effectiveness
 , pp. 157 - 179
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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