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Journal of Information Technology

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the technical size and organizational complexity of SAP/R3 projects on implementation effort. Traditional models for predicting software implementation effort tie measures of code size and programming complexity to development time. ERP projects shift a significant proportion of the implementation effort from code development to the parameterization of a pre-existing software package. At the same time, they move complexity from technical to organizational factors since they force companies to adapt to predefined work processes embedded in the software. This paper redefines the concepts of size and complexity for ERP projects and empirically verifies their impact on implementation effort. Specifically, project size is measured in terms of the number of SAP modules and submodules that are implemented, while complexity is defined as the organizational scope of the project in terms of users involved and overall company size. Hypotheses are tested on 43 SAP/R3 projects conducted in a cross-section of manufacturing companies. The findings show that both the technical size and organizational complexity of projects are relevant drivers of implementation effort. The results indicate that implementation effort not only grows with the number of modules and submodules that are selected for implementation, but that SAP is found to require increasing resources to be implemented in larger companies and for a higher number of users, thus indicating that, while there is a technical component of effort that is independent of the organizational breadth of the project, each user adds an organizational component of costs.

DOI

10.1080/02683960010035943

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