Developing a model for enterprise application software package selection by comparative analysis of existing approaches and evaluation of application results

Today?s organizations are increasingly purchasing enterprise software packages instead of custom developing their own software applications due to the growth in software companies, coupled with diverse skill requirements, and rapidly changing technology. Purchasing appropriate enterprise software packages requires a comprehensive selection process that contains multiple objectives with conflicts, and involves usage of data that can be quantitative like cost and qualitative like linguistic variables. In this process, a systematic and repeatable selection methodology is a crucial need for minimizing the uncertainty and risk. In literature, several approaches have been proposed for software selection and evaluation. After a comparative analysis of existing approaches, it is recognized that there is still a need for the development of new models that supports the software selection process from requirements analysis to final selection decision. In this thesis study, titled ?Developing a Model for Enterprise Application Software Package Selection by Comparative Analysis of Existing Approaches and Evaluation of Application Results?, an integrated model that covers all phases of software selection process is presented. In the presented model, it is aimed to assist decision-makers in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations for selecting most suitable enterprise software. These evaluations are combined in a multi-objective mathematical programming model to make final selection decision. The most important contribution that the proposed model makes to the software selection literature is to present a systematic methodology for defining selection criteria. This methodology uses fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) approach for determining non-functional criteria according to company?s system requirements. In this phase, a fuzzy set theory and simulation based solution is proposed to transform qualitative data in the form of linguistic variables into numerical values. The all phases of presented model are applied in an electronic company?s ERP software selection project. The satisfactory results are obtained during this project. The company can select the right software to fit its business processes instead of adapting its business processes to fit the software. In this way, the applicability of the model that is tested by scenario analyses is validated with a real application. Keywords: Enterprise application software package, software selection, fuzzy QFD, multi-criteria decision making, multi-objective mathematical programming, ERP.