Technical report on the project for improving the JAEA's enterprise resource planning system

Kimura, Hideo; Aoyagi, Tetsuo; Sato, Taiichi; Sakai, Manabu; Hikasa, Naoki*; Suzuki, Hitoshi; Tsuji, Minoru

The financial accounting and contract management system of JAEA, built on a commercial ERP package, had suffered from serious problems of high lifecycle cost, poor response, and lack of extensibility, due to the too much customization to the ERP package, and disorganized software structure. To solve those problems, three approaches were applied; (1) conducting thorough analysis of business flow and fit/gap, which enabled removing all customization brought to the ERP package; (2) dividing the system into subsystems, and clearly defining interfaces between the subsystems, which increases the transparency, extensibility and performance of the system; (3) outsourcing the development of the subsystems to multiple venders to reduce the development cost. Those approaches can be useful for developing business information systems using commercial software to save time and cost, while meeting the unique requirements of an organization.