A Study On The Integrated Evaluation Of ERP Implementation Projects Based On The Whole Life Circle

The manufacturing industry, as a pillar industry, has been the motive force to thenational economy.It is an important source of GNP. The market environment and themanagement characteristics of the manufacturing enterprises vary thoroughly sincethe 80's in the 20th century. Manuanfacturing enterprise informatization, of which theimplementation and application of ERP is a key part, becomes the important way toraise the manufacturing industry competition ability as well as the overall nationalpower. However, most of ERP implementation projects in manufacturing enterprisesof China get along unsuccessfully for many reasons. The lack of essential evaluationmethod and means in each stage of the implementation process is one of the importantreasons.This paper firstly divides the stage of whole life cycle of the ERPimplementation projects. It applies the theory of project management into partitioningthe process of ERP implementation and puts forward the integrated evaluation modelof ERP implementation projects based on the whole life cycle. Aimming at improvingthe present situation by bringing forward evaluation means, the integrated evaluationmodel frame covers three stages of whole life cycle in the ERP implementationprojects, "start-implement-finish", which the evaluations of implementation capability,capability maturity and performance of ERP implementation projects are involved in.As a specialized research on the technique for evaluation, the paper uses thetraditional project evaluation, which puts forward "beforehand evaluation", "on-goingevaluation" and "performance evaluation", for reference. Then it builds upERP-ICEM (Implementation Capability Evaluation Model for ERP), ERP-CMM(Capability Maturity Model for ERP), and ERP-PEM (Performance Evaluation Modelfor ERP).In the Implementation Capability Evaluation Model for ERP (ERP-ICEM), wecan evaluate ability of ERP implementation projects in three aspects: ability of themanagement in the enterprise, ability that the enterprise prepares for the project andability of external support to the project. By means of the valid standard of theevaluation and analysis through contrasting, whether the ERP project should becarried out or not can be easily decided.Capability Maturity Model for ERP (ERP-CMM) concerns the key factors, time(T), cost(C) and quantity (Q) and etc., which the enterprise cares for mostly in theERP project implementation on-going process. By this, capability maturity is dividedinto initial class, re-usable class, defined class, manageable class and optimized class,which will guide the enterprise to establish the strategy to improve the capabilitymaturity and provide the basis for the control in the process of the implementation.Performance Evaluation Model for ERP (ERP-PEM) pays attention tocontinuous improvement of the ERP implementation projects and the development ofthe orginzation in the future. It draws from the evaluation "spirit" of the balancedscorecard (BSC) that combines finance together with the performance in the future todefine the influential factors of the performance.The paper chooses AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Progress) to weigh the importanceof the indexes in the ERP-ICEM, ERP-CMM, and ERP-PEM and chooses expertevaluation and the comprehensive evaluation based on multi-layer gray theories as theevaluation methods of these three models. In the end, the author applies ERP-PEM toevaluate the performance of the ERP implementation project in Corp A.