PPSS: CBR system for ERP project pre-planning

Abstract

At the initiation stage of project, a project pre-planning is an essential job for project success, especially for large-scale information system projects like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Systematic estimation of resources like time, cost and manpower is very important but difficult because of the following reasons: 1) it involves lots of factors and their relationships, 2) it is not easy to apply mathematical model to the estimation, and 3) every ERP project is different from one another. In this article, we propose a system named PPSS (Project Pre-planning Support System) that helps the project manager to make a pre-plan of ERP project with case-based reasoning (CBR). He can make a project pre-plan by adjusting the most similar case retrieved from the case base. We adopt rule-based reasoning for the case adjustment which is one of the most difficult jobs in CBR. We have collected ERP implementation cases by interviewing with project managers, and organized them with XML (Extensible Markup Language) © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.