NEXT: Generating tailored ERP applications from ontological enterprise models

Abstract

Tailoring Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to the needs of the enterprise still is a technical endeavor, often requiring the (de)activation of modules, modification of configuration files or even execution of database queries. Considering the large body of work on Enterprise Modeling and Model-Driven Software Engineering, this is remarkable: Ideally, one models one’s own enterprise and, at the press of a button, ERP software tailored to the needs of the modeled enterprise is generated. In this paper, we introduce NEXT, a novel model-driven software generation approach being developed with precisely this goal in mind. It uses the expressive power of ontological enterprise models (OEMs) to generate ERP cloud applications. An OEM only describes the real-world phenomena essential to the enterprise, using terms and customizations specific to the enterprise. We present our considerations during development of the OEM modeling language, which is designed to capture the specifics of enterprise phenomena in a way that technical details can be derived from it. We expect NEXT to drastically shorten the time-to-market of ERP software, from months–years to hours–days.