An FCM-Fuzzy AHP Approach to Estimating Organisational Readiness for Implementing an ERP System

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are very costly and difficult to be implemented. Organizations need to be ready for implementing them. They require assessing their current readiness and then, they can perform a range of activities to improve their readiness. The ERP readiness is influenced by many factors which are interrelated and any improvement in one of them has direct and indirect influences on the others. This paper develops a new approach for assessing the ERP readiness in organization by considering casual relationships between influential factors. The approach enables an organization to evaluate its ERP implementation readiness by considering two issues: (1) how the factors influence each other and (2) how they contribute on overall readiness. To address the first issue we use fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) and for the second issue we use the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). An empirical study is conducted to demonstrate the assessment.