Design Principle Candidates for ERP Implementation Programs in Decentralized Organizations

Despite extensive research, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations remain prone to failure. Many companies are now decentralized to enhance agility in uncertain environments. Existing guidance appears not to sufficiently address the challenges arising from a decentralized context. Therefore, this design research project aims to develop context-sensitive design principles to complement existing ERP implementation guidance. Referring to the echelonized design science research process, the paper reports results from the first echelon. By analyzing requirements and solution features from relevant literature, we identify three general requirements and 14 solution features, which are synthesized into five design principle candidates. These candidates are preliminarily validated with domain experts and provide a foundation for additional design and development as well as demonstration and evaluation echelons.