Exploring Relationships in Tailoring Option, Task Category, and Effort in ERP Software Maintenance

Maintenance to in-house applications is often done by modifying source code; however, packaged applications also enable certain maintenance to be done through changes to configurational parameters rather than through changes to the source code. This research presents preliminary evidence from the field to fill this gap in the empirical understanding of ERP maintenance. Using data from 503 ERP maintenance requests, the author’s results suggest that relative maintenance effort distributions for all maintenance categories and tailoring options are not normal distributions but heavy-tailed positively skewed distributions. Comparing ERP systems to in-house developed software, the author found a large proportion of corrective maintenance requests than adaptive requests. Enhancement and corrective task categories that use the programming tailoring option show a trend of increment in relative maintenance effort per request moving median over time. In contrast, enhancement and adaptive task categories that use the configuration tailoring option show a trend of reduction in relative maintenance effort per request moving median over time. The number of maintenance requests for all tailoring options and task categories were increasingly high four months after the introduction of a new module. Comparatively, under the same period, there was relatively higher number of maintenance requests for enhancement task category than other task categories, indicating that unique or orthogonal requirements were not available in the ERP system.