The Financial Impact of ERP Architecture on the Annual Cost of Business Change

Purchasing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is a complex process that involves both meeting business functional needs and mitigating the longer-term expense of keeping the system up to date and optimized for supporting critical business changes. In a survey conducted in the spring of 2013, IDC found that the ongoing investment to keep systems in sync with changing business needs and requirements can be substantial, particularly when the systems that must be changed to support the business are built on inflexible architectures. The results of that survey were published in the May 2013 IDC White Paper Maintaining ERP Systems: The Cost of Change and included the following key findings.