A hybrid multi criteria decision making approach for consultant selection problem in ERP project

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects are risk prone due to software complexity, budget overruns, long duration, poor project delivery and a broad range of organization transformation processes. Companies are hiring experienced external consultants to achieve successful implementation of ERP system. Proper selection of ERP consultant is challenging task for any top management of organization because consultant fees accounts a major portion of project cost and this problem may be considered as Multi criteria decision-making problem. This article presents the hybrid approach of Fuzzy Analytical hierarchy process (F-AHP) and COPRAS-G in selection process of ERP consultants. F-AHP is used to obtain the weight of selection criteria and COPRAS-G is used to get the final ranking of consultants based on utility degree. The proposed model is illustrated with a numerical example whose data has been collected from survey in Indian industries. Finally, sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the robustness of the approached. The result of F- AHP highlights that reputation, ERP project experience and partner of ERP vendor and cost is an important selection criterion for selecting consultant and rank reversal problem has been greatly reduced by COPRAS-G. This proposed hybrid technique is quite flexible and provides efficient decision making in the selection of an ERP consultant.