Technical performance evaluation of ERP packages with two-stage DEA approach

Enterprise resources planning (ERP) systems attract many attentions from industry sector because of their ability to facilitate and integrate the enterprise operations. However, many expenses accompany the implementation of these systems and consecutive changes which doing a precise and comprehensive performance evaluation a necessary part of this process. These evaluations should consider operational and technical aspects of ERP systems to reflect the effectiveness of them toward the organization's requirements. In this paper, a two-stage data envelopment analysis model (DEA) is presented in order to evaluate the efficiency of ERP systems in such a way that the operational and the technical aspect are evaluated in the first stage and the second stage of DEM model, respectively. Based on the obtained results the ERP systems’ functionality and customizability to the client processes are the two key features that need to be considered by the providers. Furthermore, the findings of parameter sensitivity analysis of the proposed model provide deep and managerial insights into the further usability improvements of ERP systems.