Measuring reusability during requirement engineering of an ERP implementation

Due to growth in size and business, organizations embrace enterprise software solutions. It helps them to formalize and automate their processes. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are widely used in software solutions. They provide standard and flexible processes for a specific domain. Requirement engineering activities play a fundamental and decisive role in ERP implementations success. During requirement engineering cycle, consultants reuse different artifacts from previous implementations and ERP documentation. Those artifacts include business process diagrams, user cases and mapping sheets for configuration and migration. So there is the need of a metric suite, which can help consultants to measure different aspects of reusability. For this study, interviews were conducted with 17 ERP consultants who had diverse regional and ERP solutions experience. Details of different reusable artifacts and their benefits are discussed. Furthermore, reusability metrics suite is presented to measure cost, benefit, and a return of investment of reusable artifact. We concluded that the use of reusable artifacts during requirement engineering cycle of ERP implementation can increase the chances of success.