Performance evaluation for an ERP system in case of system failures

Abstract

This paper proposes an analytical method to evaluate the performance of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in case of system failures. A system failure means the software or hardware between processes been malfunctioning. At first, an ERP system is a complex network (an ERP net) composed of various business processes. The nodes in the net 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 document flow under the net. By using the fuzzy linguistic results of the ERP examination of the users, a fuzzy linguistic performance index, defuzzified from the probability of maximal flow not less than d, is proposed to evaluate such performance, which can be used to assess the system performance either before or after the system going live. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.