SCOPING OF PILOT TESTING OF ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

Abstract

 Planning of pilot testing is among important problems of creation of Enterprise resource planning. Pilot (experimental) projects are  intended for testing of the main functions of the created system by  limited number of “advanced” users. A key task when planning pilot testing is determination of its volume. If the volume of the pilot  project is small, then essentially important functions of system can be  not checked, and the probability of detection of essential mistakes at  full introduction will be high. If the volume is big, then amount of  works on implementation of the pilot project considerably increases, and there will be no necessary speed and flexibility of testing of the  main functions, because of which pilot testing is organized, and its  efficiency will be close to efficiency of full introduction. The article describes mathematical problem definition of pilot testing scoping which  relies on results of the solution of formation problems of a portfolio  of IT services and creation scheduling of Enterprise resource planning  of the large metallurgical company. The solutions for the considered  task are sets of the services and communications which are subject to  check between them satisfying to the set restriction for volume of the  resources allocated for testing realization, and delivering an optimum  to the set criterion. The procedure of the task solution is based on network programming method which relies on structural and similar network representation of criterion and restrictions. The procedure and an  example of the solution of the studied task in which separate estimated  tasks are solved by method of dichotomizing programming are shown.  The received approximate solutions of an objective can be improved by means of the solution of a dual problem of network programming.  For the purpose of finding of initial task global optimum, the method of  branches and borders can be used in which the criterions of function of  the found approximate solutions are applied as border values. The considered task can be generalized for preferences of the consumers of IT  service concerning need of check of services various communications.  These preferences can be considered by introduction of “scales” of the  corresponding communications. The general scheme of the solution of  a task at the same time doesn’t change.