Impact analysis of ERP post-implementation modifications: Design, tool support and evaluation

ERP systems evolve in the post-implementation phase because of changing business requirements. Post-implementation changes are likely to decrease the quality of ERP systems and of the data that they use, which negatively impacts organisational performance. We propose a framework for impact analysis of ERP post-implementation modifications. Our framework allows mapping dependencies among ERP system components and, based on these dependencies, automatically assessing the impact of a proposed change on both the design-time structure and run-time landscape of the system through a novel set of impact metrics. The framework also provides semi-automatic support to safely terminating the running process instances affected by change. The framework is evaluated with expert users in two pseudo-real ERP system implementations.