Evaluating Critical Strategies for Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Implementation

This paper presents a new evaluation model for the general evaluation problem of the critical strategy which can facilitate a successful enterprise resource planning systems implementation for achieving both global goals of an organization and local objectives of its business units. Based on a cascaded balanced scorecard (BSC) framework, the evaluation model effectively enables the goal alignment across the organizational hierarchy. A linguistic rating method is used to make subjective assessments across the four perspectives of BSC at both the business unit and organization levels. A new algorithm using the concept of multiattribute decision making is developed to obtain an overall contribution rate for each critical strategy. The overall contribution rate of a critical strategy indicates the degree to which the strategy implemented at each business unit contribute to the overall achievement of the organization´s global strategic goals, relative to other critical strategies. Effective planning and management of critical strategies can be facilitated by analyzing and aggregating the overall contribution rate of critical strategies from the aspects of the whole organization, BSC perspectives, and individual business units respectively. An empirical study is conducted to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the evaluation model and the algorithm.