ERP software requirement elicitation with reference models

COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) ERP systems provide a lot of reusable software packages, which accelerate the implementation process to some extent. However they also put enterprises into a dilemma: whether to adapt as-is business processes or to customize software packages. In order to help the enterprises get out of the dilemma, a holistic methodology is proposed to automatically elicit software requirement using reference models as domain knowledge. The methodology involves three phases: business modeling, gap detection and gap bridging. Firstly, VPML is employed to describe as-is business process, Secondly, semantics computing technology is employed to analyze the gap between enterprise needs and COTS software capacity. At last, Goal Reasoning Technology is employed to encourage enterprise users and software vendors take participate in decision making process together. This paper focuses on the method to reason with goal model.