A Comprehensive Approach of Exploring Usability Problems in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a frequently used system among organizations to automate their workflows, and companies’ performances are highly dependent on the ERP system. The usability issues of ERP systems may cause performance degradation, resulting in the company’s loss in terms of cost. Previously, several studies reported many usability problems of ERP systems. It can be helpful for the developers and designers of ERP systems to use design recommendations as a quick reference to avoid recurrent usability problems of ERP systems. Currently, this area lacks effective consolidation of the previously reported usability problems data. This paper presents a unique approach to developing a precise checklist of ERP usability problems using the topic modeling technique. Our analysis found six different usability problem-related topics that can be generalized for various ERP systems. We have successfully validated our checklist in three different usability studies of ERP systems. The most found usability problems are “difficulty searching and finding desired item/information in interface and error handling” and “missing data and information”. The outcome of our paper is the provision of recommendations to avoid the usability problems of ERP systems and help organizations efficiently prevent frequent issues during the development and maintenance of ERP systems.