After a Successful Business Case of ERP - What Happens then?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) systems are increasingly playing a central role in many organizations. However, before implementing ERPs organizations create business cases that are used when deciding on an ERP investment. The research questions are: How do organizations evaluate ERP investments and what models do they use to follow up the business case of an ERP investment? To say something about this we investigated the development and use of ERP business cases in five manufacturing organizations, by conducting semi-structured interviews with executives. The main conclusion from the research is that the realization of the business case in many cases is made to put together arguments to “sell” a specific investment to management and decision makers. When a decision then is made and there is consensus within the organization that the project is necessary, it is expressed that there is no longer any need to monitor returns from an investment in ERPs.