Assessing needs and opportunities of a risk management approach to erp projects

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are extremely complex information systems, whose implementation is often unsuccessful. In recent years these systems have received much attention both from academic literature and practitioners, so that various methods were proposed to try improving success rate of ERP introduction or implementation efficiency. However, ERP projects still continue to be considered complex and risky to implement in business enterprises. A possible explanation for high ERP project failure rate is that managers do not take prudent measures to assess and manage risks involved in these projects (Wei et al., 2005). In literature few authors promoted a structured risk management approaches in facing this kind of projects, but dealing with risk management for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) introduction projects is a difficult task, so that an effective and efficient risk management methodology is still a wish. The scope of the present work is to discuss the main challenges, opportunities and shortcomings related to the development of a risk management methodology for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects. In this aim, the structure of the paper is the following one: • Introduction-It presents a general description of the ERP systems, risk management perspective, its peculiarities in ERP introduction projects and specifies main objectives of the work • ERP risk management framework-It reports the authors' perspective on the issues, introducing and discussing around an ERP Risk Management Framework driving the next stages of the review. • ERP risk management review-It reports the review results comparing specific methodological works on ERP risk management. The identified contributions are described and analyzed according to the previous presented risk management framework. • Discussion-The paragraph discusses main evidence from the critical review of the literature, analyzing main gaps and shortcomings in the field and suggesting future directions. • Conclusion-It resumes the discussions about the overall coverage of the topic, utility for managers and researchers and main open issues. © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.