Applying PPM to ERP Maintenance and Continuous Improvement Initiatives

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) has been implemented in many companies during the last decade and has gained an increasing significance. For many companies it means that the focus is no longer on how to implement the ERP system, but rather on how to maintain and improve the system to gain business benefits from the systems. However the ERP literature on how to do this is limited. The purpose of this article is to explore how Project Portfolio Management (PPM) from the Research and Development (R&D) literature can be applied to an ERP second wave context, when companies are to prioritize and select maintenance and continuous improvement initiatives. This is done by reviewing the existing literature in the fields of PPM from R&D literature and then by reviewing the existing literature about maintenance and improvement initiatives in the ERP literature, after which the two are compared and discussed using three case-studies. The paper contributes with a discussion on how PPM from R&D can be applied to maintenance and continuous improvement initiatives in the second wave of ERP. The paper ends with arguing that emphasis needs to be given to this field, since a conscious and systematic prioritization of maintenance and improvement initiatives is believed to be able to increase business performance.