Study on ERP software maintenance (ID: 3-064)

ERP software plays an important role in pushing enterprises into information era. It's not only a sort of large software system but also integrated with advanced management thought. However, people pay more attention on ERP selection and implementation, which neglects its maintenance and upgrade. Although its maintenance is very difficult, towards this important area, there are not appropriate maintenance method, model and expert experience. This leads to that organizations and enterprises pay a lot of money for its maintenance after it was delivered. At the same time, ERP can not be used efficiently. It was estimated that annual maintenance costs approximate 25% of initial ERP implementation costs, and upgrade costs as much as 25-33% of the initial ERP implementation. In this paper, main characteristics of ERP software compared with other traditional software were analyzed, and factors influencing ERP software maintenance were summarized. The concept model of ERP maintenance was build and main work of maintenance process was generalized. The model mainly comprises two maintenance stages, one is the maintenance preparation stage and the other is maintenance procedure stage. It's to be note that this concept model only is an abstract expression of ERP software maintenance, which includes a series of activities and tasks. At last, some opinions to improve ERP software efficiency were put forward.