Toward a model-driven, alignment-oriented ERP methodology

Abstract

Current methods for project management in the software engineering field consider a project as a process that transforms a specific business need into specific software. The role played by standard applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) raises questions about the relationship between the business needs of the company and the conditions required to implement the applications that exist independently of these needs. The historical answers of software engineering to the issue of strategic alignment between business, organization, information system and architecture are not sufficient to support an ERP project. This paper proposes a model-driven ERP project approach, focused on alignment and taking into account models of a company's requirements and models of the capabilities of existing applications and technologies. The company's needs are analyzed as dependent on existing applications. IS (re)engineering then becomes a process of alignment between models of needs, of solutions, of organizations and of contexts. Our engineering project approach supports this idea of alignment as a process of consistency built between partial models, characterizing all of the dependencies between their constructs. We illustrate the construction of this approach with the analysis of three typical cases from our consulting experience, ranging from projects that focus on technical migration to projects that require the complete re-engineering of a business. We then characterize the different situations of alignment between business and technology, for different models set in our modeling framework, taking into account standard business knowledge and applications.