Integration Obstacles During ERP Development

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have increasingly been developed and integrated with other internal and external systems. This paper contributes to the field of enterprise systems integration by clarifying the concept of integration in the context of ERP systems. We investigated integration obstacles during ERP development in 5 large organizations through theme-based interviews. Besides considering integration as purely technical challenge, our findings reveal the other perspectives of integration. In total 31 environmental, technical, managerial, and organizational integration obstacles were identified from empirical data and further mapped with 13 ERP challenge categories derived from the literature. Our findings reveal that integration barriers are related to all 13 categories of ERP challenges. This indicates that integration should not be a separate project from ERP development. Identifying the integration obstacles is necessary for practitioners to develop counteractions to enterprise integration problems.