ERP

798 Words2 Pages

Since the 1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software was deployed in private sector organizations, public sector ERP adoption has lagged behind them (Harris, 2004). Until the late 1990s, most public sector organizations relied on disparate commercially available and in-house developed applications with limited or no direct integration (Byrne, 2011). Such applications were costly to maintain and very limited in flexibility, reporting and analytical capability. With the challenge of addressing the year 2000 issue in their legacy systems most of them turned toward ERP. The late 1990s saw a wave of public sector ERP implementations driven more by a need to replace systems with year 2000 compliance issues rather than business process improvement (Kavanagh & Miranda, 2005). However, many of early public sector ERP implementations have failed to achieve desired goals and resulted negative press stories such as cost and schedule overruns, payroll issues, and financial reporting issues. After the year 2000 ERP wave, public sector ERP adopters tended to be more risk averse in their approach, and began to shift from focusing on replacing legacy systems to focusing on the expected return on investment (Harris, 2004). This process was forced ERP vendors to re-measure their software and service packages and to develop public sector-specific functionality or modules for their solutions instead of trying to fit their private sector-oriented product offerings into the public sector. SAP, for example, introduced several functional modules such as fund management, grant management, position budgeting and control to their product range which were required for public sector clients. By 2005, the public sector ERP market had matured, and sev... ... middle of paper ... ...project” (p. 1). In addition to above, selecting ERP consultants, selecting an ERP vendor and selecting suitable employees for implementation team also might be difficult due to the influences, trade union activities, etc. Business re-engineering process also might be affected due to organizational cultures, employee attitudes and less involvements of top management. At present, public sector organizations in Sri Lanka invest large amounts of money from their earnings as well as from government allocations for IT related developments. Some of them are successfully implemented ERP solutions and most of them are considering or already implementing ERP solutions in their organizations. The main goal of this research is to enlighten the way of ERP implementation in public sector organizations in Sri Lanka by identifying critical success factors in Sri Lankan context.

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