Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning is an enterprise system that incorporates essential entities of the corporate sustainable value chain into a centralised system. It is a massive information system, and its deployment requires a considerable investment of money and time. Unwell plan, limited resources, and weak commitment can lead to the failure of system implementation. Few studies have discussed the concept of Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning systems. However, little research has focused on the implementation aspect of the system, especially on proposing a general plan that can guide practitioners to implement the Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning systems. To address this gap, this study aimed to develop comprehensive guidelines that provide steps and activities for implementing the system. The guidelines are developed using a conceptual research method that relies on the examination of literature to find and integrate various concepts, including sustainability aspects, project management, organisational decision levels, and stratc management. The method envelopes three phases: (i) Collection of steps and activities from the existing sustainability and ERP guidelines, (ii) Classification and evaluation of the identified steps and activities, and (iii) Identification of steps and activities required for the guidelines. The proposed guidelines entail three main modules comprising implementation steps, levels, and activities. The results would be useful for practitioners in giving a formal direction to efficiently implement Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning systems in their corporate value chains.

Introduction

Sustainability is a concept and process of enforcing environmental, economic, and social transformation towards a better quality of life (Scheidel et al., 2018). The philosophical reason for the emergence of this concept is the occurrence of environmental and social problems in society. This notion directs people to think of renewable resources, protection of the natural environment, human development, and other related aspects, and act for present and future generations (Sauvé et al., 2016). The importance of sustainability has been firstly acknowledged in the Brundtland Commission, the Rio Earth Summit, and other international conferences. International and regional governments impose industries to change their corporate’s vision, mission, goals, and strategies in the direction of sustainability. Organisations now prioritise sustainability in organisational and social policies and regulations (van Zanten et al., 2018). Embracing sustainable business practices in an organisation’s value chain can have a number of significant benefits such as increasing productivity and creativity (Bryson, 2017), evading fraud and mismanagement (Moosa and Ramiah, 2018), improving employees’ loyalty (Law et al., 2017), and more reliable products (Küçüksayraç, ۲۰۱۵). Sustainability should be intertwined as an essential component of the corporate strategy, culture, and business processes.