A Fuzzy-MOORA approach for ERP system selection

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.