ERP failure: a systematic mapping of the literature

With the development of different technologies, the use and importance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems continue to increase daily. In parallel with this increasing use, a lot of research is being done to successfully complete ERP implementation projects. However, despite these researches, reported case studies show that the success rates of ERP projects are meager.

Based on the examples of experienced failure, researchers determine very different failure factors with varying perspectives for companies in different industry sectors, cultures, and sizes. It is becoming increasingly difficult for many practitioners and researchers to understand these failure factors correctly. Our objective is to investigate the state-of-the-art ERP Failure Factors that could benefit practitioners to utilize that information potentially.

We review the body of knowledge related to ERP failure factors in the form of a systematic literature mapping (SLM). We pose four sets of research questions and systematically develop and refine a classification schema. The initial pool consisted of 353 articles. Systematic voting was conducted among the authors regarding the inclusion/exclusion criteria. As a result, there were 72 technical articles in our final pool.

This SLM provides an overview of ERP critical failure factors (CFF) with different focused headings. These headings cover qualitative coding about CFF names, CFF rankings, the relation between CFF and ERP processes and failure modes, etc.

The results of this study would benefit three groups of stakeholders: (i) Researchers who work on ERP Failure Factors, (ii) Solution implementers who provide consultancy services to companies that carry out ERP Implementation projects, and (iii) ERP project implementation managers. These stakeholders could utilize the results of this SLM to catch the trend of ERP implementation challenges.