Tailoring the Enterprise System to the Organisational Needs - The Case of Sap Implementation

Although the research literature on Enterprise Systems is prolific and covers all stages of the system lifecycle, detailed analysis of the implementation process is limited. Furthermore, misconceptions can be found in the literature, regarding the ways the standard system is tailored to the needs of a specific organisation. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to investigate how the Enterprise System is adjusted to the needs of a specific organisation during the implementation phase, basing on the case study performed during SAP system implementation project. The results of the case study suggest that for big, configurable Enterprise System, like SAP ECC, even “vanilla” implementation, which involves only the configuration of the system, without any modifications to the code or adding new code is a big, time and effort consuming undertaking. The company being subject to the study used a mixed approach to tailor the system to its needs. Business processes were modelled in the system with the use of configuration, but customisation (changing or adding code) was needed to build interfaces, reports and printouts