Abstract:
Nowadays, worldwide competition and need for possessing competitive advantage have forced Iranian small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to employ information technology (IT) to take advantage of their benefits. Due to SMEs‟ special characteristics generally referred to as resource poverty, these businesses are more inclined to purchase packaged software to meet their organizational needs for advanced computational technologies. However, the evaluation and selection of appropriate packaged software which satisfactorily meet these requirements is a complicated software engineering process and the selection of wrong packaged software can dramatically impose negative impacts over business processes and profitability. Using a questionnaire-based survey to collect data from the managers of manufacturing SMEs, IT experts, vendors, producers of packaged software and software engineers in Iran, as well as through applying the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method, TOPSIS, this paper aims to answer the question which domestically provided software package is the fittest with the needs of Iranian manufacturing SMEs. The methodology and findings offer valuable insights to decision makers to select the most appropriate packaged software to fit with business process.