Risk Prediction in ERP Projects: Classification of Reengineered Business Processes

Companies have been implementing ERPs for almost ten years now and the same implementation problems continue to occur. More and more, ERP project´s technological challenges are accompanied by critical dimensions related to the management of the transformational effects of these projects on the organization. Indeed, risk management in this kind of project is not very structured and misses specific methods. In this article, we propose a structured methodology for risk management particularly in the BPR (Business Process Reengineering) sub-project of ERP implementation. The final aim of our work is to decease appreciably resistance to organizational change which poses the greatest obstacle to business process reengineering efforts. We propose to adapt OSR (Optimal Set Reduction), a risk management method used in software development, for the risk management in ERP implementation. We address specially the risk related to the changes in enterprise processes in the ERP project. To achieve this objective we propose to define business process change metrics starting from business process complexity metrics that exist in the literature.