Linguistic performance evaluation for an ERP system with link failures

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a complex network composed of various business processes. It can be called an ERP net. This paper proposes an analytic method to evaluate the Linguistic performance of such net under link failure situations. A link failure in an ERP net means that the software or hardware between processes may malfunction. To facility such evaluation, the nodes in the net denote the persons responsible for the business tasks during the processes. The links between nodes denote the process precedence relationships in the ERP system. When the process starts, the documents (jobs) 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. The performance failure of an ERP system is therefore defined by the condition that the document flow of the system is under the acceptable level d. By using the fuzzy linguistic results of the ERP examination of the users, we propose a fuzzy linguistic performance index, defuzzified from the probability of maximal flow not less than d, to evaluate the performance of an ERP system. An algorithm is subsequently proposed to generate the performance index under link failure situations, which can be used to real time assess the system performance either before or after the system going live.