Developing an ERP technology: Handling incompleteness of the system

•The study explores the development of ERP technology as an inscription.•It looks at how the world of organizing is translated into an ERP technology.•It shows how staff and IT developers experience the system as being incomplete.•This incompleteness is faced in terms of particularity, continuity, and multiplicity.•Users try to compensate for this by adding more inscriptions to the ERP system.

SummaryThis study explores the development of ERP technology as an inscription. A single case study in a food manufacturing firm investigates the development of a technological script for manufacturing operations. The study shows the sense of incompleteness that accompanies ERP system development and explains how organizational members and system developers experience and attempt to compensate for that incompleteness by adding more particularity, trying to restore continuity, and compensating for the loss of multiplicity in the system. The study explains how these actions lead to the production of more inscriptions and the addition of layers of activity to the ERP system that the users of the system must then deal with.