ERP Implementation Approaches: A Comparative Study

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is an integrated application module based
package which covers most of the business process and functions of an enterprise. ERP
systems are widely being used by industries. However, the results of the research efforts
carried out in this field reveal that the rate of successful implementations for ERP projects
is low and in most cases the planned goals are not achieved. There are many different
implementation approaches and each approach has its defects that may cause increasing in
the implementation cost and time and may affect the implementation quality. The most two
common ERP implementation approaches are Big bang implementation approach and
Agile implementation approach. In recent research work we proposed a hybrid approach to
avoid the disadvantages for these approaches. In this paper we propose a method to
compare ERP implementation approaches and we used it to demonstrate the benefits of the
new hybrid approach. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the different
implementation approaches.