Case-Based Reasoning Support for ERP Pre-Planning

A project planning is one of the most important processes that determines success and failure of the project. A pre-project planning is also essential job for information system implementations at the early stage of project planning, especially for management information system like ERP. However, pre-project planning is very difficult, because lots of factors and their relationships should be considered. Pre-project planning of ERP implementation has been done by project manager's own knowledge and experiences. In this article, we propose a system that help project manager to make a pre-project plan of ERP project with case-based reasoning(CBR) framework. The proposed CBR system saves previous cases of ERP pre-project planning in the case base. Then, the system finds the best similar case with the current pre-project planning problem. Project manager can make a pre-project plan by adjusting the most similar case. From the interview with project managers, we collect some field cases of ERP implementation. We organized these cases by using XML(Extensible Markup Language), which is good for representing hierarchical information. XML gives us some flexibilities to correct and maintain cases. We make a prototype system, PPSS(Project Planning Support System) that help project manager to make a pre-project plan of ERP implementations. The object of the system is to support project manager to make a pre-project plan of ERP. We hope the result of the study can be applied to other information systems. Our research should be extended to cover other stages of project planning.