Packaged Enterprise System Customization – A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

A packaged enterprise system (PES) is an Enterprise System (ES) software package that is built with certain assumptions about the business processes. It is offered to the business with an implemented and predefined set of functionalities, which, however, are seldom usable immediately, but require some customization. Sometimes only minor changes to PES are made while occasionally the system, offering more possibilities, is configured significantly. This paper aims at mapping what we know about PES customization, and presents a systematic literature review to form a coherent understanding of its topics, themes, methods, publication outlets, scientific disciplines, and researchers. Our findings show that the topic is scattered across disciplines and domains, the studies mostly relying on surveys and implementation phase case studies, and giving a generic view rather than focusing on certain domain or the type of PES. We thus propose a set of potential research topics, for example on the business domain level to better understand the dynamics of customization and its influencing factor.