Using maturity assessments to understand the ERP requirements engineering process

Applying standard requirements engineering (RE) processes is a major trend in today's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software engineering. It emerged five years ago with the promise to provide a mechanism helping ERP project organizations deliver their business requirements timely and within budget. This paper looks in depth at a standard ERP RE process and seeks answers to four questions: how well it is defined, what are the risks associated with its application in mature/immature organizations, what are the essential practices that contribute to its success, and what are the costs of the process and the quality of the delivered results. The main motivation of this paper is to provide some practical advice for using assessments to increase project teams' understanding of the ERP RE process.