M.M. Cruz-Cunha et al. (Eds.): CENTERIS 2011, Part I, CCIS 219, pp. 168–177, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 ERP Lifecycle: When to Retire Your ERP System? Moutaz Haddara 1 and Ahmed Elragal 2 1 University of Agder, Norway 2 German University in Cairo (GUC), Main Entrance El-Tagamoa El-Khames, New Cairo 11835, Egypt moutaz.haddara@uia.no, ahmed.elragal@guc.edu.eg Abstract. A lot of research has been undertaken focusing on ERP systems lifecycles, but very little paid attention to retirement. ERP retirement means the replacement of an ERP with another. The aim of this research paper is to investigate why and when should organizations retire their ERP systems. A convenience case study of an SME has been selected from Egypt. The case study under investigation has retired their local ERP system and replaced it with SAP ERP. Results of our analysis indicated that reasons of retirement were: wrong selection, users were not involved in the selection process, and lack of an official implementation methodology. This is considered a new finding since main stream literature was mainly focused on retirement after maturity. Keywords: ERP, retirement, lifecycle, case study. 1 Introduction Besides globalization, there are many other forces e.g., competition, rise of the information economy, etc that drive an organization to an ERP adoption decision. Mostly, organizations adopt ERP systems to manage the everyday large volume of operations and information which are created from within the organization. Not only this, more and more organizations are involved in strategic business alliances, and a substantial volume of information needs to be controlled and utilized amongst these partnerships. All of this has led to the punctual need for ERP systems, which is why nowadays small and medium enterprises are adopting ERP systems in order to manage this vast information flow. Due to the substantial needed efforts, organizational changes, time and resources, an ERP adoption is considered one of the biggest and most critical projects a company could carry out [1]. ERP adoption projects may vary in size, methodology, and structure. The implementation process requires a systematic and careful management monitoring and decision making [2]. There are many variables and factors that can affect an ERP adoption process. Contextual factors (e.g. government policies, culture) [3-5], legacy software reuse, and embracing a specific vendor’s ERP implementation methodology are among those factors [6]. ERP adoptions in SMEs differ than those of large enterprises, as organization size serves as an important variable [7, 8]. In general, SMEs have been recognized as vitally different environments compared to large enterprises [9]. The literature calls