Offshoring ERP Implementations: Critical Success Factors in European Perspective

Abstract

Abstract. Information Technology (IT) offshoring is changing the way IT departments are run and organized by organizations. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are changing the way organizations run their businesses. Both are seminal trends which bring along with their associated benefits to organizations. However, both IT offshoring and ERP implementations are loaded with risks. When IT offshoring and ERP implementations happen together, the risks get compounded. This paper presents the critical success factors of offshoring ERP implementations. The study is an exploratory and qualitative study that starts with in depth interviews and concludes with a focus group discussion. The findings reveal that six factors are critical in offshoring of ERP implementations, namely communication & culture, offshoring partner, organization change management, project management, team skills and work & team distribution. The scope of the study was restricted to offshoring happening from Europe to India and the focus was on large offshoring engagements.

Making the Sourcing Decision of Software Maintenance and Information Technology

“…Likewise, in the distributed environment scheduling and task assignment become more complicated due to the factors such as frequently changing requirements, lake of informal communication and synchronization. Thus, it calls for deeply focus on project and relationship management [1], [11]. Thus, the reliable contract management and better client-vendor relationship can handle the challenges posed by outsourcing [12], [92], [93].…”

“…The current study provided a comprehensive overview of the three aspects of outsourcing namely: benefits of IT outsourcing, influencing factors of IT outsourcing and influencing factors of software maintenance offshoring. The study presented, perceived benefits (11) of IT outsourcing, influencing factors (14) of IT outsourcing and a list of 15 important parameters of software maintenance offshoring. Amongst the identified factors of IT outsourcing and application maintenance offshore outsourcing, only 6 factors were tagged as critical for both the data sets, namely: cultural diversity, cost, employees' skills, legal requirements, infrastructure and language barrier.…”

“…The outsourcing strategy has changed software maintenance's objective from the service to keep the information system operational to the enhancement of the businesses' processes and to the achievements of business profits. So, the organizations' focus has shifted from lowering the cost to maximizing the benefits and cost saving up to 20-50% through offshore outsourcing [9]- [11]. Offshore outsourcing is a business practice for the development and maintenance of software at low cost.…”

Empirical Investigation of Influencing Factors Regarding Offshore Outsourcing Decision of Application Maintenance

“…In distributed projects the 'project management' plays an important role, since the management of the scattered teams across the globe is a difficult task. The major hurdles of global software development such as frequent requirement changes, poor communication and synchronization make more challenging the tasks assignment and scheduling in the distributed project [60], [64].…”

Explaining the Challenges in ERP Development Networks with Triggers, Root Causes, and Consequences

“…From a project management point of view, ERP projects are difficult due to their organizational complexity (Leyh & Sander, 2015;Ngai et al, 2008;Ram & Corkindale, 2014;Shaul & Tauber, 2013). Compared to onsite projects, globally distributed projects encounter additional risks and are more difficult to manage (Betz, Oberweis, & Stephan, 2010;Chauhan, Dwivedi, & Sherry, 2012;da Silva, Costa, Franca, & Prikladinicki, 2010). An unclear project plan with no milestones can cause project management problems (Nah et al, 2001;Ngai et al, 2008;Shaul & Tauber, 2013).…”