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5 RELATED WORKS
Despite the widespread adoption of ERPs by
business organizations (Joseph, 1998), there is still a
lot of academic research need on ERPs from the
engineering perspective (Borell, 2000).
Two families of approaches were developed to
address the matching issue: the management
approaches and the system approaches. In the
management family, research intends to define the
impact of ERP installation on corporate culture
(Krumbholz, 2000), organization (Robey, 2002), or
business processes (Esteves, 2002). In the system
family, the purpose has been to guide the
identification and selection of the most appropriate
ERP (Ncube, 2000), and to elicit requirements to
inform the most adequate customisation of ERPs
(Finkelstein, 2002).
Our approach is in-between the two families. Its
main assumption is that in an ERP project, the issue
of organizational change and system engineering are
intertwined. Therefore, their matching should be
neither driven by the business nor driven by the
system functionality, but both.
Several works have already been achieved on
similarity measure. For example, (Castano, 1993)
proposes to evaluate components reusability through
conceptual schema. (Jilani, 1997) used similarity
measures to select best-fit components. Similarity
metrics for heterogeneous database schema analysis
were introduced by (Bianco, 1999). Our similarity
approach is inspired by Castano and Bianco.
6 CONCLUSION
Our experience in an ERP project at SNCF
confirmed to us the importance of the matching
between the world of business and the one of
systems and the necessity of using similarity
analysis techniques to support this matching. Our
approach to this issue was to use a goal/strategy
model called map as an in-between language on
which the matching process can be achieved in an
efficient way. So far, we have: (i) developed a
specific methodological framework that sets in
context the business models, system functionality
models, and the matching approach, (ii) defined the
issues of matching business models and system
functionality models and (iii) adopted a similarity
typology to systematise the specification of the
result from matching activities.
The next tasks in our research program are: to
further document our methodological framework, to
complete the similarity typology and to develop a
completely guided methodological process model.
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MATCHING ERP FUNCTIONALITIES WITH THE LOGISTIC REQUIREMENTS OF FRENCH RAILWAYS: A
SIMILARITY APPROACH
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