Analysis of challenges and critical success factors of ERP implementations – a multiple-stakeholder perspective

Background: Organisations use and implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with the intention to stay competitive or gain a competitive advantage. Yet, many organisations fail at implementing ERP systems successfully in terms of exceeding project scope, time and costs, and at delivering the expected benefits. Previous research has mainly focused on identifying and ranking critical success factors (CSF), whereas the explanation of how to apply these CSFs and what challenges occur in applying them has been lacking. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to understand how practitioners with different backgrounds perceive the CSFs of an ERP implementation and which challenges occur while applying them. Method: This study adopted an abductive qualitative research approach, whereby an interview study was performed. The empirical data has been gathered through semi-structured interviews, in which our from literature derived CSF framework served as basis. Subsequently, the empirical data was analysed with regards to the Technological-Organisational-Environmental (TOE) framework. This was followed by a cross-perspective analysisand a discussion in which the main findings from the analysis are compared to previous research results. Conclusion: The findings of this thesis mostly confirm the actual perceived criticality of most of the derived CSFs from literature. However, the perspectives and opinions on how to apply them differ with regards to certain CSFs between internal and external stakeholders involved in ERP projects. Complementary, the major challenges that were mentioned by participants are the lack of a sufficient pre-analysis, the lack of resources in terms of skilled personnel, budget and time, and the lack of internal as well as external communication and cooperation. Therefore, this thesis contributes to the current literature by mostly confirming the justification of conducting research on CSFs and by identifying major challenges in applying CSFs which can hinder organisations from successfully implementing an ERP system.