An integrated decision support system dealing with qualitative and quantitative objectives for enterprise software selection

Previous methods for enterprise software selection generally take into account the attributes that are restricted to some financial factors, such as costs and benefits. However, the literature lacks studies on considering the evaluation of both functional and non-functional suitability of software alternatives versus various requirements. This study presents a new decision support system for combining these two kinds of evaluation to select suitable enterprise software. A hierarchical objective structure that contains both qualitative and quantitative objectives is proposed to evaluate software products systematically. This approach uses a heuristic algorithm, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making procedure and a multi-objective programming model to make final selection decision. All the phases of presented method are applied in an electronic company's ERP software selection project to validate it with a real application. 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. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.