Knowledge discovery from an ERP database in the context of new product development

This paper is aimed at using an ERP database to identify the variables that have a significant influence on the duration of a project phase. In the paper, some methodologies of the knowledge discovery process are compared and a model of knowledge discovery from an ERP database is proposed. The presented approach is dedicated for the industrial enterprises that use an ERP system to plan and control the development of new products. The example contains four stages of the knowledge discovery process, such as data selection, data transformation, data mining, and the interpretation of patterns. Among data mining techniques, a fuzzy neural system is chosen to seek relationships between data from completed projects and other data stored in an ERP system.