Maintenance Trends in ERP Systems

During the late 1990’s, many Japanese firms replaced their legacy and traditional enterprise information systems with ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. These systems cannot continue in use without maintenance. However, themaintenance of ERP systems differs from maintenance of traditional custom-built information systems. Moreover,maintenance requirements are known to change throughout in the operational phase. This study investigated the actualoccurrence frequency of maintenance tasks classified into 6 categories during each month in five years (60 months) of ERPoperation after go-live in three case studies of Japanese manufacturing firms. Through this investigation, this study identifiedclear the maintenance trends common to three firms, based on the maintenance occurrence frequencies in each firm