Using Ontology for Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Edward Babkin, Ekaterina Potapova Faculty of Business Informatics and Applied Mathematics State University – Higher School of Economics Nizhny Novgorod, Russia babkin@hse.nnov.ru , eopotapova@mail.ru Abstract — Implementing information management system is still a challenging task for any organization. A lot of surveys are conducted to find out the root causes of implementation problems and propose new methods that can improve and simplify this process. In this paper we suggest using an ontology- based decision support system to avoid some implementation challenges. Key words: ontology, Enterprise Resource Planning systems, implementation approaches Despite development of many implementation methodologies, integration of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is still a challenging task for any organization. Here by ERP we mean not only the systems whose functionality corresponds to ERP standards, but also any information system that helps to manage key areas of the business from the beginning to end, e.g. customer relationship management systems, supply chain management systems, strategic planning systems, etc. Within this research we would like to express our view on the problems of ERP implementation: we try to analyze the main reasons for them and propose a new approach which makes ERP implementation process more effective by using ontology-based decision support systems. A lot of researches are conducted to investigate the reasons for the faults of ERP implementation projects. The most common challenges that are usually underlined are relevant for any software development project: end-user not being ready, resistance to change, lack of communication and support documentation, lack of resources, lack of commitment from top leadership and technical infrastructure problems [3]. But it is also possible to mark out some issues that are really specific to ERP implementation such as data conversion, work practices incompatibility, unnecessary ERP functionality unrelated to customer’s requirements, staff turnover, unavailability of skilled IT specialists, etc. From development viewpoint, ERP specific challenges can be explained by the fact that, on the one hand, modern ERP systems contain a huge amount of functionality plus a wide range of configuration methods, but, on the other hand, they still can’t fully satisfy customers’ needs and that’s why customers need to do modifications in the system. These obstacles put two important questions before the project team: • How is it possible to use native ‘Off The Shelf’ (OTS) provided functionality as much as possible to build solution that will fully satisfy customer’s requirements? • If it is not possible to use OTS, what ways of configuration can be used instead of modifications? A common way to get the answers to these questions is to form a team of highly experienced people and do a time- consuming documentation analysis. Instead of it we propose to use a special ontology-based decision support system that will be able to propose configuration according to customer’s requirements. The approaches to modeling enterprise ontology have been already analyzed in some researches [1, 2], but within our work we would like to use ontology not to model enterprise only, but also express the ERP functionality so that it allows to compare user requirements and system processes and to find missing configuration in the system. To illustrate how an ontology-based decision support system can be used within ERP implementation authors developed a prototype of such system for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution provided by SAP Corporation. As the volume of SAP CRM functionality is pretty huge within the first attempt to build ontology of this system we decided to limit the scope of ontology by the main processes of managing master data objects within sales scenario: Account & Contacts Management, Organizational Management and Territory Management. From general prospective our ontology consists of four sub ontologies: ontology of requirements, ontology of main master data objects, ontology of business processes and ontology of configuration objects 978-1-4244-3806-8/09/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE 67