Selecting an enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system that simultaneously satisfies sustainability, circular economy,
and Industry 4.0 requirements is a multi-criteria decision problem complicated
by incomplete information and small expert panels, in which judgments are more
naturally expressed as ordinal priorities than as precise scores. To address
the lack of an integrated sustainable-ERP (S-ERP) selection framework for these
conditions, this study develops and applies a Grey System Theory (GST)–based Grey
Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA-G). The framework embeds sustainability,
circular economy, and Industry 4.0 criteria in a single decision structure and
represents the judgments of a three-member expert panel as ordinal priorities
under grey interval uncertainty, avoiding pairwise comparisons while preserving
uncertainty through grey numbers. The model is applied to a real manufacturing
case, and its robustness is tested through seven expert-priority scenarios
together with area-level (±10%, ±20%) and ordinal perturbation analyses, and
benchmarked against Grey TOPSIS and Grey VIKOR. The results show that the
Fundamental and Economic criteria dominate the decision (0.640), followed by
Industry 4.0 compatibility (0.233), environmental (0.099), and social (0.028)
criteria; System Cost, Quality, and Financial Situation are the most
influential criteria, while Cloud and Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence,
and IoT are the leading digital requirements. The framework yields the ranking
ERP1 > ERP2 > ERP3 > ERP4, which remains unchanged across all
perturbation scenarios and is reproduced identically by Grey TOPSIS and Grey
VIKOR. Although economic performance remains primary, Industry 4.0 capabilities
are the decisive enablers that make environmental and social monitoring
operationally executable. The proposed framework therefore offers a
transparent, robust, and practically implementable decision-support tool for
sustainable ERP procurement under uncertainty, extensible to multi-firm panels
and broader sustainability domains.