Engineering the Coordination Requirements in Cross-organizational ERP Projects: A Package of Good Practices

Abstract

There is yet little knowledge about cross-organizational Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation projects when it comes to determining requirements and achieving alignment between IT and businesses. Consequently, the requirements engineering (RE) processes are often more expensive and less effective as they could be. In this chapter, the authors view a cross-organization ERP implementation as a coordination problem, and introduce a coordination complexity model based on an organization’s level of participation in a business network. They show how the external coordination characteristics of an organization can be mapped to ERP-supported mechanisms for cross-organizational coordination. To incorporate this activity in the state-of-the-art ERP RE processes, the authors propose a set of good practices that counterpart certain coordination issues at different complexity levels. Their chapter is based on empirical data gathered from secondary sources. They also carried out an early validation assessment based on an online focus group composed of ERP solution architects