Enterprise Information Systems of the Future

This case study covers the story of a process reengineering effort at Belgacom Mobile, the largest Belgian mobile telecommunications operator. It describes how a smart combination of theoretical concepts can lead to process innovation, and product innovation. The process innovation effort consisted of a large automation pillar and the rebuilding of the enterprise backbone system SPOMS. Architectural principles were applied to allow the redesigned process to be flexible and capable of dealing with newly emerging SIM card types and technological advances. The sub-processes will be orchestrated by the process owner who controls the entire process from a process dashboard. This case shows the potential benefits of Business Process Management (BPM), IT-enabled innovation and Product Factory. The redesigned SIM card ordering process thus provides a sustainable answer to the ever shortening life-cycle of products and technologies, SIM cards in particular, and the call for process flexibility in fast changing environments.

The contribution of this project to the general understanding IT-enabled innovation lies in the innovative approach. Namely, product and process were separated from each other by means of Production Process ID creation. The redesigned SIM card ordering process thus provides a sustainable answer to the ever shortening life-cycle of products and technologies, SIM cards in particular. The redesigned sub-processes are orchestrated by the process owner who controls the entire process from a process dashboard. In terms of performance improvement, the project resulted in (1) increased process flexibility (2) and consistency, (3) dramatically shortened lead-times and (4) better control over the process.

Dependency analyses have become crucial in today’s enterprise architecture practices, which usually face complex IT landscapes with highly interdependent applications. In such environments, a deep understanding of the application’s context is essential to determine its qualities and project its further evolution. However, method support for making this context a tangible IT landscape management part and thus facilitating quantitative decision making still seems expandable. Based on the representation as a network of applications and their relations of data exchange, this paper therefore suggests ways to support the IT landscape’s examination through network analysis. We develop this approach based on a combination of theoretical explanations, past empirical findings, and experiences taken from the architecture practices of four sample organizations. We illustrate and evaluate our approach with a short case study. Our approach, developed and illustrated in close alignment with insights from actual practice, thus offers ideas and advice for researchers and practitioners alike.

This interpretive research study explores intention to adopt SaaS ERP software within South African SMEs. Semi-structured interviews with participants from different industry sectors were performed and seven multidimensional factors emerged explaining the current reluctance to adoption. While, improved IT reliability and perceived cost reduction were seem as benefits they were dominated by other reasons. Reluctance to adopt was attributed to systems performance and availability risk; sunk cost and satisfaction with existing systems; data security risk; loss of control and lack of vendor trust; and finally functionality fit and customization limitations. The findings provide new insights into the slow SaaS ERP adoption in South Africa and provide empirically supported data to guide future research efforts. Findings can be used by SaaS vendors to address perceived shortcomings of SaaS ERP software.

Most business processes in real life are not strictly ruled by the information systems that support them. This behavior is reflected in the traces stored by information systems. It is useful to diagnose in early stages of business process analysis. Process diagnostics is part of the process mining and it encompasses process performance analysis, anomaly detection, and inspection of interesting patterns.The techniques developed in this area have problems to detect sub-processes associated with the analyzed process and framing anomalies and significant patterns in the detected sub-processes. This proposal allows to segment the aligned traces and to form representative groups of sub-processes that compose the process analyzed. The tree of building blocks obtained reflects the hierarchical organization that is established between the sub-processes, considering main execution patterns. The proposal allows greater accuracy in the diagnosis. Based on the findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Software projects need to predict the cost and effort with its associated quantity of resources at the beginning of every project. Information Mining projects are not an exception to this requirement, particularly when they are required by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). An existing Information Mining projects estimation method is not reliable for small-sized projects because it tends to overestimates the estimated efforts. Therefore, considering the characteristics of these projects developed with the CRISP-DM methodology, an estimation method oriented to SMEs is proposed in this paper. First, the main features of SMEs’ projects are described and applied as cost drivers of the new method with the corresponding formula. Then this is validated by comparing its results to the existing estimation method using SMEs real projects. As a result, it can be seen that the proposed method produces a more accurate estimation than the existing estimation method for small-sized projects.

Current workflow management systems implement the ability to automatically execute predefined process models. However, processes change over time and therefore a redeployment process has to be implemented to propagate changes into the running process enactment environment. One of the necessary steps in change propagation is to suspend the current process execution. This suspension does however decrease availability of the workflow management system, increases downtime and implicitly also decreases scalability. In this paper we provide a quantification of the impact of suspension on the runtime process enactment environment and experimentally evaluate this impact, hereby providing a better insight in suspension impact. Furthermore two suspension techniques are compared and a discussion is provided in which situations, which suspension technique is beneficial.

Globally ERP implementation in higher education (HE) sector has been increasing with universities under pressure to improve their performance and efficiency. Most of the studies related to ERP implementation in higher education are related to the factors which influence the success of ERP implementation or failures across various universities especially in the US and Australia. There is limited study of ERP implementation in HE institutes from a user perspective. Indian HE institutions have just started adopting ERP and there is no study available related to the Indian universities. In this paper we study the employee perceptions, motivations and use of ERP and the implications to the organization objectives. We study the ERP implementation in an Indian HE institute and provide a descriptive case study which can serve as a real life example for HE institutes in India and other developing countries planning to implement Enterprise Systems.

This paper investigates the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system use in budgeting in order to explain how and why ERP systems are used or not used in budgeting practices. Budgeting is considered as a social phenomenon which requires flexibility for decision-making and integration for management controls. The analysis at the activity levels, guided by the concept of ‘conflict’ in structuration theory (ST), suggests that ERP systems impede flexibility in decision-making. However, the systems have the potential to facilitate integration in management controls. The analysis at the structural level, guided by the concept of ‘contradiction’ in ST, concludes that the ERP systems are not widely used in budgeting. This is because the systems support the integration function alone while budgeting assumes both roles. This paper offers the ERP system non-use explanation from an ulitarian perspective. Additionally, it calls for solutions to improve ERP use especially for the integration function.

This article presents a Decision Support System which focuses on an important organizational context: maintenance decisions. Usually, a specific management system is required to deal with data on failure, reliability, maintainability and availability regarding equipment. The maintenance context is surrounded by uncertainty and does not provide a clear profit from its activities, and thus requires a tool which fits in with organizational needs. The tool presented in this paper considers the requirements and approaches of an industrial production system, using concepts and methodologies from Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) to establish maintenance strategies, such as inspection and preventive maintenance planning, and also takes into consideration sophisticated MCDA and FMECA models for strategic decision making.

Different opinions about whether an organization gains a competitive advantage (CA) from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system exist. However, this paper describes another angle of the much reported competitive advantage discussion. The basic question in the paper concerns how thoughts about receiving competitive advantage from customizing ERPs influences feedback in ERP development. ERP development is described as having three stakeholders: an ERP vendor, an ERP partner or re-seller, and the ERP end-user or client. The question asked is: What influence has thoughts about receiving competitive advantage on the feedback related to requirements in ERP development? From a set of theoretical propositions eight scenarios are proposed. These scenarios are then illustrated from interviews with stakeholders in ERP development. From an initial research, evidence for six of these eight scenarios was uncovered. The main conclusion is that thoughts about competitive advantage seem to influence the feedback, but not really in the way that was initial assumed. Instead of, as was assumed, having a restrict view of providing feedback stakeholders seems to be more interested in having a working feedback loop in the ERP value-chain making the parties in a specific value-chain more interested in competing with other parties in other ERP value-chains.

Enterprises are part of value chains consisting of cross-enterprise business processes forming large business networks of customers, vendors, partners and competitors. These business process networks run on (technical) integration networks, which are semantically interlinked with the processes, while both are correlated to organizational (social) networks, consisting of technical and business domain experts. The insight into these networks promise a competitive advantage through the visibility into the linked enterprise data. However, this information is hidden in complex, dynamic and heterogeneous enterprise domains.

In this position paper, we introduce the new domain of Business Network Management (BNM), which strives to make business networks visible within network views and sets them into context with each other. For that, we extend the Network Mining (NM) domain by a virtualized network approach towards a BNM. That means automatic discovery, mining and inference capabilities are combined with expert knowledge from different domains to compute the networks and a semantic correlation between entities of different perspectives. We comprehensively define the domain and discuss a system implementation, which we evaluated in a real-world customer case.

The aim of this paper is to present the software development techniques used to build the EIS Patterns development framework, which is a testbed for a series of techniques that aim at giving more flexibility to EIS in general. Some of these techniques are customizations or extensions of practices created by the agile software development movement, while others represent new proposals. This paper also aims at helping promoting more discussion around the EIS development questions, since most of research papers in EIS area focus on deployment, IT, or business related issues, leaving the discussion on development techniques ill-treated.

A problem addressed by an information mining project is transforming existing business information of an organization into useful knowledge for decision making. Thus, the traditional software development process for requirements elicitation cannot be used to acquire required information for information mining process. In this context, a process of requirements gathering for information mining projects is presented, emphasizing the following phases: conceptualization, business definition and information mining process identification.

This article discusses the financial perspective in a case study at ICTRA that deals with improving ICT service delivery. It outlines the three-step approach taken in the Finance Transformation Project and explains how this approach helped ICTRA in becoming a more business-oriented ICT shared service centre.

Many books and articles have been written about the importance of business process management. However, in practice, improving business processes remains challenging. Therefore, business process maturity models (BPMMs) have been developed to assist organizations in their search for business process excellence (e.g. CMMI or OMG-BPMM). However, given their importance, a BPMM proliferation exists and practitioners are left without overview. Moreover, BPMMs differ in approach. An organization wishing to start with a BPMM thus risks selecting a model that does not fully fits its needs. The BPMM literature and the general literature on maturity models are mainly restricted to the design perspective. To our knowledge, the user’s perspective is largely neglected. Based on an international Delphi study, this article introduces 14 criteria that (potential) BPMM users must consider to obtain a fit for purpose. The findings will be used to build a decision tool for BPMM selection.

Cloud computing is at “the peak of inflated expectations” on the Gartner Hype Cycle from 2010. Service models constitute a layer in the cloud computing model and Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the important service models. Software as a Service provides complete business applications delivered over the web and more specific when delivering enterprise systems (ES) applications such as ERP, CRM and others we can further categorize the model as an Enterprise Systems as a Service (ESaaS) model. However it is said that ESaaS is one of the last frontier for cloud computing due to security risk, downtime and other factors. The hype about cloud computing and ESaaS made us speculate about our local context, Denmark, what are the current situation and how might ESaaS develop. We are asking the question: Will ESaaS become an organizing vision in Denmark? We used empirical data from a database with more than 1150 Danish organizations using ES, informal contacts to vendors etc. The result of our study is very surprising as none of the organizations in the database apply ESaaS although recent information from vendors indicates more than 50 ESaaS implementations in Denmark. We discuss the distance between the community discourse and current status of real ESaaS implementations.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is slowly find its place in many organizations in Macedonia. The primary goal of an ERP implementation is managing and coordinating all resources, information, and business processes from shared data stores. This paper elaborates on an ERP solution implementation in the Macedonian production sector and the effect it has on the company efficiency. A case study was conducted in a small or medium-sized manufacturing company in Macedonia during a period of seven years and compared to empirical findings of ERP systems implementations in developed countries. Findings show almost similar results. ERP systems implementations require time, money and management commitment and the effect to improve efficiency is embryonic. However it was also noticed that ERP system implementation helps in the transformation of the ownership of the company and in establishing better market competitiveness.

One important module of Enterprise Information System (EIS) is the development and implementation of the security component of EIS. Furthermore, this EIS Security structure needs to be monitored through the corporate governance of the firm. Based on a literature review and our previous work, we identified four key pillars of a model for EIS Security. These pillars are Security Policy (e.g., set rules for employee behavior), Security Awareness (e.g., continued education of employees), Access Control (e.g., access linked to employee job function), and Top Level Management Support (e.g., engrain information security into the company’s culture). We explore the relevance of this model using a case study approach by way of interviewing top-level information systems mangers in the banking sector. We validate the model through using key informant in-depth interviews and qualitative research methods.

The ability of enterprise information systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing executive systems (MES) and customer relation management (CRM), to improve production and business performance are demanding more attention from enterprises, since increase in competitive advantages is a goal to be reached. Integration of all the information flowing through a company is a key characteristic of ERP systems. Enterprise systems are not developed in-house and so, in order to implement an ERP project successfully, organizations must purchase ERP systems which can be aligned with their needs. In a group decision context where all opinions and preferences must be taken into account, choosing the most suitable alternative may be a hard work. In this study, a group preference aggregation approach based on a combination of ELECTRE II and ELECTRE IV method is presented within the context of ERP project selection.

The aim of our study was to gain insight into the research field of critical success factors (CSFs) of enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation projects and of IT projects and to compare the different CSFs. Therefore, we conducted two literature reviews, more specifically systematic reviews of relevant articles in different databases and among several international conference proceedings. Ultimately, we identified 241 relevant papers (111 single or multiple case studies, 82 surveys, and 48 literature reviews or articles from which CSFs can be derived). From these existing studies, we discovered 31 different CSFs for ERP implementation and 24 different CSFs for IT projects. The top two factors identified are equal in both reviews – Top management support and involvement and Project management. However, there are nine CSFs that seem to be relevant only for ERP implementations and two factors that could be found only in the review of IT projects.

This work in progress paper presents a preliminary analysis on the challenges of knowledge management (KM) experienced in the ERP implementation phase. This paper is an integral section of an ongoing research focusing on the role of KM during the ERP implementation lifecycle in both large and medium organizations in South Africa. One of the key research objectives is to investigate the core challenges of KM in large and medium organizations in South Africa. A review of the existing literature reveals a lack of comprehensive KM research during the different ERP implementation phases and particularly, in emerging economies. Initial findings include lack of process, technical and project knowledge as key challenges. Other concerns include poor understanding of the need for change, lack of contextualization and management support. This paper closes some of the identified research gaps in this area and should benefit large organizations in the South African economy.

A typical problem in Software Engineering is how to guarantee that all system’s requirements are correctly implemented through source code. Traditionally, requirement tracing is a manual task comprised of keeping links from requirements to source code, going through different modeling artifacts, including models. However, these techniques cannot guarantee that requirements are always correctly implemented by source code. Aiming at solving this problem, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a specification technique that automatically checks if all functional requirements are treated properly by source code through the connection of the textual description of requirements to automated tests. Given that for Enterprise Information Systems, requirements are usually identified by analyzing business process models, and these processes are implemented through workflows, connecting workflows to automated tests through BDD specifications can provide automated requirements traceability. The aim of this paper is to briefly present this proposal and show how it was implemented for the open source ERP5 system.

Objective of this experience report is to address specific issues regarding standard SAP ERP implementation in a medical institution. Target Company is a state owned health care institution from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Report will treat selected issues which could trouble standard SAP ERP implementation trough predefined ERP implementation methodology for SAP ERP. This report presents observations/remarks based on experience of authors in particular SAP ERP implementation project in health care institution. Author’s goal is to provide useful insight into “real life” standard ERP implementation and problems that arise. Also, it should provide useful information for all stakeholders involved in the process of ERP implementation in public health care sector.

When there are insufficient inputs for a product-level approach to requirements elicitation, a process-level perspective is an alternative way for achieving the intended base requirements. We define a V+V process approach that supports the creation of the intended requirements, beginning in a process level perspective and evolving to a product-level perspective trough successive models derivation with the purpose of creating context for the implementation teams. The requirements are expressed through models, namely logical architectural models and stereotyped sequence diagrams. Those models alongside with the entire approach are validated using the architecture validation method ARID.