Article history: Received June 9, 2012 Accepted 5 July 2012 Available online July 6 2012 In today’s global and dynamic business environment, manufacturing organizations face the tremendous challenge of expanding markets and meeting the customer expectations. It compels them to lower total cost in the entire supply chain, shorten throughput time, reduce inventory, expand product choice, provide more reliable delivery dates and better customer service, improve quality, and efficiently coordinate demand, supply and production. In order to accomplish these objectives, the manufacturing organizations are turning to enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which is an enterprise-wide information system to interlace all the necessary business functions, such as product planning, purchasing, inventory control, sales, financial and human resources into a single system having a shared database. Thus to survive in the global competitive environment, implementation of a suitable ERP system is mandatory. However, selecting a wrong ERP system may adversely affect the manufacturing organization’s overall performance. Due to limitations in available resources, complexity of ERP systems and diversity of alternatives, it is often difficult for a manufacturing organization to select and install the most suitable ERP system. In this paper, two ERP system selection problems are solved using fuzzy multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) method and it is observed that in both the cases, SAP is the best solution. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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A Fuzzy-MOORA approach for ERP system selection

The ISO/IEC 9126 international standard for software product quality is a widely accepted reference for terminology regarding the multi-faceted concept of software product quality. Based on this standard, the Software Improvement Group has developed a pragmatic approach for measuring technical quality of software products. This quality model introduces another level below the hierarchy defined by ISO/IEC 9126, which consists of system properties such as volume, duplication, unit complexity and others. A mapping between system properties and ISO/IEC 9126 characteristics is defined in a binary fashion: a property either influences a characteristic or not. This mapping embodies consensus among three experts based, in an informal way, on their experience in software quality assessment. We have conducted a survey-based experiment to study the mapping between system properties and quality characteristics. We used the Analytic Hierarchy Process as a formally structured method to elicit the relative importance of system properties and quality characteristics from a group of 22 software quality experts. We analyzed the results of the experiment with two objectives: (i) to validate the original binary mapping and (ii) to refine the mapping using the elicited relative weights.

A survey-based study of the mapping of system properties to ISO/IEC 9126 maintainability characteristics

Open source Customer Relationship Management CRM software is frequently used to support a firm's front-end activities such as sales, marketing, and customer service. This article presents an efficient decision making framework to select the best open source CRM software using Analytic Hierarchy Process AHP from not only the functionality aspect, but also from the organizational perspective. This framework would be useful for managers who intend to adopt open source CRM software for their organization.

Open Source CRM Software Selection using the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Any ERP software in the market cannot fully meet the needs and expectations of manufacturing companies, because each company, which looks for implementing ERP system, runs its business with different strategies and goals. Therefore, enterprise resource planning ERP software selection is an important and critical decision process. Another aspect of this problem is that multi-disciplinary content reveals the multi-criteria decision making as the appropriate field of study. In this study, by employing TODIM method, which allows the usage of both qualitative and quantitative data, an example, which involves ERP software selection process of a steel forming and hot dip-galvanising firm located in Izmir, Turkey, is provided by using a proposed framework. A new path toward ERP software selection is designed for the decision makers in various industries include manufacturing companies. In order to deal with the complex calculations in the decision making process, the proposed framework is formed as an applicable tool for all decision makers in various industries.

ERP software selection with MCDM: application of TODIM method

“ERP success” measures are the most important, but they cannot be analyzed and understood without “software quality” and “information quality” measurements [1]. Moreover, high software quality is an essential requirement in an ERP system. And, it will further influence information quality and ERP success. Consequently, the determination of ERP software selection criteria for ERP success plays an important role while organizations consider implementing an ERP system. This study presents a conceptual framework to investigate how ERP software selection criterion are linked to software quality, information quality and ERP success in the ERP implementing process, as well as, the impacts of those factors on software quality. Through a cross-sectional survey of top 5000 largest companies in Taiwan, undertaken in 2006, the study explores 13 important selection criterion which can directly and positively influence ERP software quality in the dimension of functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency and maintainability, respectively, in pre-implementing ERP phase. Generally, software quality and information quality are critical in influencing the effectiveness of ERP success after implementing ERP system. Despite ERP software selection criterion seem less influential to ERP success, they still impact the ERP success indirectly through software quality and information quality. We consider the results are generally supportive to the research model and such support also provides additional evidence of the validity of the concept proposed in the study.

The relationship between ERP software selection criteria and ERP success

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is one of costly and crucial projects for business investment. Due to the selection criteria of ERP software are numerous and fuzziness, selecting the optimal ERP software is a critical process in the early phase of an ERP project. This paper presents a practical procedure which combines both the ISO 9126 standard and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach to optimize the ERP selection problems.
There are total 32 criteria sifted out which include 21 software quality criteria of ISO 9126 standard. Two practical cases which belong to different industries are applied to illustrate the practicality of the procedure, one is semiconductor manufacturing industry and another is chain store retailer service industry. We find that there are diverse weights for software quality criteria between these two industries. We also find that the cost issue and time issue are significantly important in both two cases.

Keywords: ERP, Decision Making, ISO 9126 Standard, FAHP

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Shing-Ko Liang

Papers

Selecting the Optimal ERP Software by Combining the ISO 9126 Standard and Fuzzy AHP Approach