Lessons from enterprise resource planning implementations in Ireland - towards smaller and shorter ERP projects

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market has been growing at a very fast pace over the last few years and has been predicted to keep gro wing rapidly in the long term. This has led to an abundance of media report s on the subject of ERP and to managers wondering whether their companies s hould implement ERP systems. In order to separate the reality of the ERP ph enomenon from the hype that surrounds it, we studied 14 ERP implementation projects in Irish organizations and focused on the key relationships betwee n organizations which attempt to implement ERP systems and their implementi ng partners. We found that the ERP implementations that are going on in Ire land at the moment are different to the projects that have been reported el sewhere in two key respects. Firstly, the organizations interested in ERP s oftware are, on average, far smaller than the case studies reported in the literature and the majority of the cases we reviewed were small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Secondly, the durations of implementation were far shor ter than reported elsewhere. These results are not surprising if one consid ers the smaller average size of Irish organizations, but they indicate that the ERP movement is truly ready for an extension towards the SME market. T hey also indicate that the duration of the implementation of ERP software m ay be related to the size and complexity of the client organization and tha t SMEs can expect to have an easier time implementing ERPs than the current literature suggests. We also found that software implementers play a key r ole, not only in technical terms, but also in managerial and political term s, because they can help their clients in correcting their expectations and perceptions of ERP systems and ERP implementations.