Decision Support in Procuring Requirements for ERP Software

The rate of successful implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is still lower than expected. One of the main reasons is that there are inevitable gaps between software capacities and organizational needs. A methodology with emphasis on gap analyzing is proposed to procure requirements for ERP software. The methodology consists of three phases: business modeling, gap detecting and gap bridging. Especially, a decision support method for bridging gaps is proposed to help the organization and software vendors get out of the dilemma: either to adapt as-is business processes or to customize software packages. Firstly, goal-process models are built as the base for decision making. Secondly, the idea of evidence theory is introduced and a quantified reasoning algorithm is proposed to precisely evaluate solutions. At last, an algorithm is proposed to compare and rank intervals which specify the expected utilization of business processes.