Identifying and ranking the effective factors on selecting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system using the combined Delphi and Shannon Entropy approach

Abstract

Despite the fact that during the last decade, many of the ERP projects have led to considerable tangible and intangible development in different areas and also to attain competitive advantages for organizations, there are a variety of stories of organizations failure in performing the ERP. One of the most important causes of failure is the organizations’ indifference in identifying the most important criteria of an appropriate system and therefore the insufficiency of selecting phase of the system. The present article tries to identify the most important criteria of ERP selection that organizations should put into account in the process of their selection, through a complete study on the past literature and researches and also including the exports’ view- points. Therefore, we have used a combined approach in this study. After a thorough review on literature and extracting all the identified criteria through the previous valid studies, using Delphi method, the following factors: cost, software quality, vendor and software capability were identified as the main factors which should be considered by the organizations. These criteria were, then, ranked using Shannon Entropy technique and the vendor was identified as the most important criterion.