Abstract:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) plays a key role in technology driven Business Process
Reengineering (BPR) by ensuring smooth alignment with best business practices and dynamic
market needs in current business setting. According to Gartner analyst firm, around 75 percent
of ERP enabled BPR projects were failures in recent 10 years. However, ERP specialists regard
agile approaches positively to mitigate common ERP implementation downsides. Although
agile practices are widely used during designing, development and quality assurance process
of ERP projects, they are rarely applied for the implementation process. However, only limited
studies have been conducted on the synchronicity between the ERP implementations and agile
approaches. The purpose of this research was, therefore, to explore a partway to develop a new
agile ERP implementation approach. A questionnaire analysis was carried out in Sri Lankan
ERP implementation companies. It was analyzed using statistical approaches to assess the
coexistence between the ERP implementation success and agile approaches. A widely used
performance metric in strategic management was used to assess the success level of ERP
implementation projects. The analysis revealed that there is a significant positive correlation
between agile approaches and ERP implementation success. At the same time incremental
change, multiple project views, business value prioritization and change management act as
key success factors for agile implementation of ERPs. The findings of the research would be
an aid to the practitioners and academics in the respective field.
