Selecting appropriate ERP software using integrated fuzzy linguistic preference relations - fuzzy TOPSIS method

Due to the high uncertainty of business environment, the complexity and diversity of enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects and conflicting assessment criteria, appropriate ERP software selection can be viewed as a multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) problem. Among the MCDM methods, extent analysis method (EAM) has been employed in many applications due to its computational simplicity. However, in EAM, inconsistency rises as the numbers of criteria or alternatives increase. In order to address this inconsistency problem, fuzzy linguistic preference relations (FLPR) has been proposed to obtain consistent solutions in the decision-making processes. This study proposes a robust ERP selection framework where the weights of the evaluation criteria are computed through FLPR and the ranking of the alternative ERP systems is obtained via Fuzzy TOPSIS. A real life application has been executed in a Turkish wholesale food company.