Situational ERP readiness for ERP failure reduction: A metamethod

Between 60 and 90 % of ERP implementation projects fail. One of the reasons is the non-ERP readiness of the organizations. However, actual ERP readiness management (ERM) methods tend to be context specific, making them inefficient in other contexts. With a focus on the African context, existing contextual and functional gaps are identified by assessing actual ERM methods. The purpose of this work is to build a metamethod capable to be specified based on the context of the organization. The solution is built using Method Engineering as Design Science methodology. The main idea is to introduce situational properties in ERM method design using the Situational Method Engineering approach based on chunks. The solution is demonstrated using experimentations and within a case study. The findings of this work provide greater insights into situational ERM design and thus are helpful for organisations to build suitable ERM methods: (1) There is no one size fits all method in IS implementation like in software development; (2) Well-formed and suitable ERM methods can be designed using the framework proposed using an easier to understand process and artefacts from this article. (3) The results open perspectives of situational ERP implementation life-cycle for ERP implementation success. In ERP implementation research, must of the contributions come from field studies. This potentially limits the scope of the results, with biases. This article comes to contribute to fill this gap in introducing SME in ERP implementation for context-aware methods as a solution to the failure issue.