A master plan for the implementation of sustainable enterprise resource planning systems (part I): concept and methodology

Abstract

Sustainability has become a business imperative and every organization needs to respond it. In practicing sustainable organizations, practitioners require to implement Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning (S-ERP) systems in order to aid them in solving a segregation problem over extended value chain. The concept of the S-ERP system can be adopted from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, however, they have distinction in terms of philosophical perspective. S-ERP system adds new dimensions of complexity, including new data types, new sources of data, and new stakeholders. It is more challenging to be implemented successfully than ERP system. Although various software vendors have developed S-ERP software applications, however, the organizations still have a difficulty to implement it due to lack of master plan that provides a holistic approach to implement the system. This problem motivates the researchers to introduce a concept of the S-ERP master plan in this study. Generally, the design of the master plan is developed based on the concept of project management as it can handle complex and complicated projects. The structure of the master plan contains of three essential components: roadmap, framework, and guidelines. These three components are closely interrelated and each of them has its own role in the S-ERP system implementation. An introduction of the S-ERP master plan concept in this paper perhaps would give a bird's eye view to the practitioners about the imperative of the master plan in order to mitigate problems that occur during the S-ERP implementation projects.