Integrated development and maintenance for the release, delivery, deployment, and customization of product software: a case study in mass‐market ERP software

Abstract

The maintenance of enterprise application software at a customer site is a complex task for software vendors. This complexity results in a significant amount of work and risk. This article presents a case study of a product software vendor that tries to reduce this complexity by integrating product data management (PDM), software configuration management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) into one system. The case study shows that by combining these management areas in a single software knowledge base, software maintenance processes can be automated and improved, thereby enabling a software vendor of enterprise resource planning software to serve a large number of customers with many different product configurations.

Enhancement of Catalyst Performance in the Direct Propene Epoxidation: A Study into Gold–Titanium Synergy

“…For a given period, the higher the unavailability, the more costly it will be. Usually great efforts are spent in maintenance in the aim of shortening maintenance time 31. Software failures usually require immediate attention 13 and it is desirable to request maintenance once a failure occurs.…”

Post local forms of repair: The (extended) situation of virtualised technical support

“…However, the types of products discussed here have a number of features making territorial forms of support difficult and expensive to sustain. It is resource intensive and, given the complexity of various systems, it would be hard to maintain the full range of requisite expertise in multiple regional offices (Jansen et al, 2006). It follows that particularly complex problems could mean hours on the phone chasing specialists in offices around the globe.…”

“…Instead, the bulk of users receive help remotely, through a virtualised medium, in which support staff rarely (if at all) meet with the users of failing systems, have little 1 One has only to read the vast (and still growing) academic and practitioner literature on the various difficulties adopters experience whilst attempting to implement enterprise-wide systems. These are highly complex and intricate packages that are built to work in a huge variety of settings, interface and run on different platforms and where there are ultimately an enormous number of permeations of these systems as they meet different socio-technical settings (Gable, 2001;Hirt & Swanson, 2001;Jansen, Ballintijn, Brinkkemper, & van Nieuwland, 2006). More analytically, we might describe these kinds of systems (and organisational information systems more generally) as exhibiting enduring complexity.…”

Software Deployment Activities and Challenges - A Case Study of Four Software Product Companies

“…Notable among research concerning software deployment are the studies by Jansen et al [2,10,11]. Their framework regarding activities necessary when updating software products [2] lays a foundation for our work.…”