ERP Integration – A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract: Companies have been adopting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for decades in order to integrate business functions to increase their competitiveness. The original goal of ERP was to provide an all-in-one integrated suite for the enterprise. However, in a modern business environment, ERPs are integrated externally with customers, suppliers and business partners and internally with continuously changing system landscape of the enterprise. In this paper we present a systematic mapping study that investigates how ERP integration-related issues have been studied by the academia between 1998 and 2012. Studies about technological issues are mostly dealing with systems inside a company whereas studies on methodological issues focus on the integration of the supply chain management and e-business. However, these studies are often either carried out without a rigorous research method or they are based on single cases only. Quantitative methods have been mainly used to investigate quality attributes of ERPs. It is still unclear, how integration issues are effectively solved by a network of stakeholders in an ERP project. This requires more research in the future.