The first international workshop on methods tools and architectures for enterprise management and resource planning (EMRPS '99) was held in Venice from the 25^th until the 27^th of November 1999. The workshop brought together researchers from both the industry and academia interested in the customisation of packaged enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) to meet the needs of specific enterprises.

The workshop comprised a set of keynote speeches, paper presentation sessions and working groups. The presentations and the discussions that took place during it were concerned with:

• the problems arising during the customisation of ERP systems for specific enterprises
• the impact that the use of such systems has to an enterprise and their ability to handle changes to an enterprise
• the technologies underlying current ERP systems and the technologies which are likely to underly the future generation of ERP systems, and
• the educational needs that the customisation and use of ERP systems creates.

In the following, I provide a summary of the discussions of the first working group (WG1) of the workshop that I chaired. The discussions in this working group focused on the problems arising in the customisation of ERP systems for specific enterprises. I have tried to be fair and unbiased in writing this summary but probably I have failed. Certainly, a short summary like it cannot do justice to the discussion. Thus, those who are interested will be better off talking to the participants or reading the papers presented in the working group which are available from:http://mosaico.iasi.rm.cnr.it/emrps'99/Index.htm.

It became apparent quite early in the discussion that customising an ERP package is different from developing a system from scratch due to two main reasons. The first reason is that the space of the feasible requirements in the former instance of application development is tightly determined by the existing functionality of the package. The second reason is that customer requirements have to be thought of and expressed in terms of the business process models that the package incorporates. The typical scenario of an ERP system customisation involves customers who are expected to map the business processes of their own enterprises onto the built-in business processes of the package and based on this mapping to figure out how to configure the functions of the package that support the matched parts of the two processes and how to change the processes of the enterprise that do not have any counterparts in the package.

As emerged from the discussions in the group, the factors which may critically affect the outcome of this activity are:

• the involvement of the stakeholders
• the need for changing parts and/or the bussiness processes of an enterprise due to the use of a package
• the ability to assess whether or not a project concerned with the customisation of an ERP system has been successful, and
• cultural factors

In the following I summarise the main points made during the discussions for each of these factors.

There was no doubt amongst the participants that the active involvement of the enterprise stakeholders including senior and middle enterprise managers as well as end-users in a ERP project can make the difference. The participants coming from the industry indicated that in their experience the end-users and those with knowledge of the business processes of the enterprise are normally involved. According to them, what is often missing from the ERP project teams is the involvement of middle management. This involvement was reported to be critical since middle management provides the necessary support and power for introducing the changes to the enterprise which are required due to the use of the package (these might be changes to the tasks and duties of certain employees, re-shuffling of roles, changes to existing workflows and so on).

The introduction of an ERP package in an enterprise is often seen as an opportunity for changing established enterprise processes and/or parts of the structure of the enterprise. Industrialists reported that in numerous cases the enterprises do not have an idea of the sort the changes required before the start of an ERP project. In such cases what triggers the changes is the belief that ERP systems use the "best" practices of the industrial sector involved and therefore the enterprise would be better-off using these practices. It was also reported that enterprises tend to see ERP packages as solutions that could reduce the costs of their core functions (these are functions necessary for the operations of the enterprises such as accounting, human resource management) and thus save them money that could be spent on their strategic functions (these are functions through which the enterprise gets an advantage over its competitors and creates revenues from). However, this might not be always true.

Thus, the establishment of the direction and the extent of the changes required before the start of an ERP project, the assessment of the impact that these changes will have to the enterprise and the estimation of the cost of introducing these changes were all said to be what determines the success or failure of the project. Unfortunately, current practice deals with these issues only after an ERP project is well under its way and not always following a systematic method.

The ability to measure the success of an ERP project in quantitative terms is certainly desirable. Large organisations tend to use industry specific benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of their processes. However, it has to be appreciated that these benchmarks are not specific to ERP packages and it is not always possible to use them to measure the cost of introducing the changes required in an enterprise due to the use of such a package. Thus, since this cost constitutes a significant element of the overall cost of an ERP system implementation, these benchmarks often cannot provide the information required for an effective cost-benefit analysis for an ERP project.

Organisational and national culture was also acknowldeged to be one of the main factors which determine the success or failure of ERP projects. More specifically, many participants indicated that culture affects the communication within project teams, the criteria used for decision making (for example whether or not decisions are made on political grounds), and certainly the attitude of the stakeholders to the changes that the use of an ERP system brings to an enterprise (ressistance vs. acceptance). It was reported that especially in multi-national projects the representation of stakeholders from different countries by delegates coming from the same countries in both the project management and the project development team is essential for running the project smoothly.