An Evaluation Method for Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a complex network composed of various business processes. This paper proposes a method based on stochastic-flow network model to evaluate the performance of an ERP system depending upon the results of the ERP examination of the users involved. The nodes in the network denote the persons responsible for the business tasks during the processes. The arcs between nodes denote the process precedence relationships in the ERP system. When the process starts, the documents are initiated from the source node to its succeeding nodes. Finally, the documents are released in the destination node. Thus, the performance of an ERP system is related to the flow of the documents through the network. The failure of an ERP system is therefore described as in the condition that the flow of the system is under the acceptable level d. We propose a performance index, the probability of the maximal flow not less than d, to evaluate the performance of an ERP system. An algorithm is subsequently proposed to generate the performance index, which can be used to assess the system performance either before or after the system going live.