Performance analysis for Enterprise Resource Planning systems

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a complex network composed of various business processes. This paper proposes methods based on stochastic-flow network model to analysis the capacity sensitivity of persons with respect to the performance of an ERP system. The nodes in the network denote the persons responsible for the business tasks during the processes. The arcs between nodes denote the process precedence relationships in the ERP system. The performance of an ERP system is then related to the flow of the documents through the network. To analyze the person¿s impact against the system performance, the increasing-capacity contributivity analysis and the decreasing-capacity impairment analysis are conducted. Some interesting findings are obtained. For example, the strategy of increasing capacity will not promise to contribute performance. However, the strategy of decreasing capacity will also not always to impair performance. Numerical examples for these analyses are illustrated in this paper.