CAiSE'01 Tutorials

Business Modelling for the Development and Implementation of Enterprise Applications

The aim of this presentation is to address the state of the art in enterprise modeling methods by showing the Dynamic Enterprise Modeling (DEM) method of Baan. The basics of the creation of enterprise models are presented and their role in implementation projects is exemplified by actual projects.

We start with an overview of DEM, and present the context of enterprise modeling in ERP selection and implementation processes. Three diagramming techniques are explained in depth:

• Enterprise Structure Diagrams: The company site structure is visualized with the dispersed geographic locations, the headquarters, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and supplier and customer locations. Physical as well as logical multi-site organizations for internal logistic or financial flow optimization can be diagrammed.
  
  
• Business Control Diagrams: BCMs are models for a concise overview of the high-level business functions in any organization, including the primary processes (manufacturing of physical goods, or rendering services), the mutual inter-relations, and the interactions with the external players environment. These BCMs are refined into business process diagrams.
  
  
• Business Process Diagrams: A detailed process modeling technique, which is based on Petri Nets, allows the flows of work in an organization to be depicted. Activities, triggers, routing decisions, sub-processes, synchronization points are all included in an easy to understand format. Furthermore, these models can be linked to enterprise applications for on-line invocation.

We end with a discussion on how the DEM concepts can be generalized for an implemenatation method of any enterprise application system.

Sjaak Brinkkemper is a Chief Architect at Baan Company Research and Development. In this function, he is responsible for the overall software process improvement initiatives of the process areas Requirements Management, Architecture and Design. He is also responsible for the Software Patenting programme at Baan. Before joining Baan, he held academic positions at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, the University of Texas at Austin in the USA and the University of Nijmegen, also in the Netherlands.

He holds a BSc in Mathematics and Physics of the University of Amsterdam, an MSc and a PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Nijmegen. He has published several papers and four books on his research interests: information systems methodology, meta-modelling, method engineering and software product development.

He has served on the programme committees of numerous conferences and workshops (CAiSE, WITS, OOIS, REFSQ). He is a member of the IFIP Working Group 8.1 on the "Design and Evaluation of Information Systems", of the ACM, of the Computer Society of the IEEE, and of the Netherlands Society for Informatics.