An Integrated Intuitionistic Fuzzy MCDM Approach to Select Cloud-Based ERP System for SMEs

ERP system is a software package that integrates and manages all the facets of the business and deeply influences the success of a business endeavor. The increasing competition in the market, rapidly changing demands, and increasing intricacy of business procedures induce enterprises to adopt ERP solutions. Adopting an ERP solution increases synchronization between business activities and reinforces managerial decision-making. However, it also involves a large investment, a significant amount of human resources and time, and risk of failure. Therefore, the selection of an ERP solution is a crucial decision for enterprises. To address this decision-making problem, we propose a four-stage multi-criteria decision-making approach in this paper. Three prevalent MCDM techniques, DEMATEL, IF-ANP, and IF-AHP, are used in different stages of the methodology to achieve better outcomes. The methodology incorporates the intuitionistic fuzzy sets to capture uncertainty and hesitancy involved in decision makers’ judgments. In addition, we develop a novel priority method to derive weights from the intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study is carried out on the selection of cloud-based ERP system for SMEs in the Chhattisgarh state of India, which indicates that the proposed four-stage approach effectively handles the ERP selection problem.