Abstract—Information Systems (IS) education is being

transformed from the development of applications towards implementation and configuration of the integrated enterprise-wide system software - Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Teaching business processes integration has become an important issue in IS education. To meet the challenge, the author presents a comprehensive approach to teach business processes integration with ERP. The paper emphasizes on teaching business processes integration with ERP as the whole process in the Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Systems courses. SAP ERP is utilized as an ERP software tool for illustration purpose.

Index Terms—Business processes, enterprise resource planning, ERP, IS curriculum, SAP.

I. INTRODUCTION The wide spread of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

technology has made information systems (IS) education shift its focus from applications development to business processes integration. In order to catch the industrial trend, IS educators have made significant changes on IS cores and elective courses in the Information Systems (IS) 2010 Curriculum Guidelines [1]. The Application Development course is no longer included in the core of the IS 2010 Curriculum. Instead, the Enterprise Architecture course has become as a new core and the Enterprise Systems course is recommended as an elective course. To meet the challenge, the author proposes a comprehensive approach of teaching the Enterprise Architecture course and Enterprise Systems course with emphasis on business processes integration based on her years of ERP research and teaching experiences. The paper specifies the course topics, objectives and corresponding ERP hands-on activities and also presents a framework which can be used by students to learn business processes integration. The paper is intended to serve as useful teaching resources for those information systems (IS) educators who are interested in teaching business processes integration using ERP in the two courses. The remaining paper is organized into five sections: 1) ERP Business Processes Integration, 2) ERP Data Integration, 3) Enterprise Architecture Course, 4) Enterprise System Course, and 5) Conclusion.

II. BUSINESS PROCESSES INTEGRATION An ERP system is large and complex and learning curve is

steep. Unlike other computer applications, ERP includes the

Manuscript received July 22, 2012; revised September 2, 2012. Ming Wang is with the Department of Information Systems, California

State University, Los Angeles (e-mail: ming.wang@calstatela.edu).

multidisciplinary scope of enterprise system concepts that requires internal cross-disciplinary coordination. To understand them, students must acquire the concept of business processes integration which is the theme in both operational and analytical systems of ERP.

Business process is a list of related activities to produce an outcome. Business processes integration means multiple business processes are inter-related to each other. Fig. 1 illustrates the inter-relationship of the integrated business processes in ERP.

Fig. 1. Business processes integration [2]

III. ERP DATA INTEGRATION ERP has the centralized data repository that integrates all

the business processes in the enterprise. This section specifies how the organization data shared across different business processes in the enterprise system. Fig. 2 shows how master data occur in major business processes in the value chain.

Customer data

Vendor data

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Materials Management

x x

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Warehouse Management

x x x

Sales & Distribution

x x

Fig. 2. Master data shared in business processes

Four types of data in the ERP system are organizational data, master data, situational data and transaction data. • Organizational data are used to represent the structure of

an enterprise include client, company, plant and business area data.

• Master data represent entities associated with the business processes such as buying materials from vendors and selling materials to customers. Master data are referenced more frequently than others across ERP systems in both operational systems and analytical systems.

Teaching Business Processes Integration with ERP In Enterprise Architecture/Systems Courses

Ming Wang

International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 4, November 2012

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Fig. 8. Enterprise systems.

Fig. 9 illustrates the SAP Implementation Methodology Road Map [3].

Fig. 9. SAP implementation methodology phases.

• Project Preparation defines the project’s scope and organizes the team, the vendors and hardware.

• Business Blueprint defines the business process requirements and discusses configuration and data migration.

• Realization configures the system, writes middleware interfaces and develops ABAP code.

• Final Preparation includes testing and training. • Go Live begins using the system.

C. SAP Configuration ASAP Roadmap and Solution Manager drive ERP

configuration. The completed reference model is known as the Enterprise Model when the configuration activities have matched the business requirements to the processing available in the Reference Structure.

The Implementation Guide (IMG) is a SAP system tool for actually making the settings that configure the R/3 System to meet a company’s requirements. The SAP IMG is an integral part of the R/3 System that is used in the configuration of the R/3 System. About 80 percent of a typical SAP system installation is handled by the IMG configuration setting. Another 10 percent are enhancement of ABAP tools and appended structure, while 10 percent are customer developed via ABAP tools.

A Project IMG is a subset of the Reference IMG that contains the documentation for selected IMG components that are implemented as part of the specific configuration project. The Project IMG facilitates the establishment of the organization arrangement during a company’s configuration by using SAP IMG [6].

VI. SUMMARY The proposed ERP business processes integration (BPI)

learning framework shown in Figure 10 summarizes the important BPI components students supposed to learn from the Enterprise architecture and enterprise Systems courses. It is a good tool to use for teaching business processes integration with ERP in Enterprise Architecture/Systems Courses. Filling out the form can be the benchmark to measure whether students have grasped the six major business processes in the ERP operational system. Students need to this framework in their mind through both courses.

ERP systems, by their multi-dimensional integrative nature, offer the depth of functionality and breadth of integration to demonstrate how global operations of organizations are managed. The learning curve is steep. The

contribution of the paper is to provide IS educators a comprehensive approach and a new BPI learning framework for teaching business processes integration with ERP in the Enterprise architecture and Enterprise systems courses recommended in IS 2010 curriculum. The goal is to teach students to understand business-centric information system and be able to implement and configure business processes.

Fig. 10. BPI learning framework.

The paper intentionally does not specify any ERP software

in most context of the paper. Institutions have to make the decision of whether and how to provide students with hands-on use experience with actual ERP software such SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SSA Global and Microsoft Dynamics (Axapta, Great Plains and Solomon) etc. Enterprise system software is in place in a majority of large organizations and increasing in use in small and medium-sized organizations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Professor Hayen, Magal,

Monk, Wagner and Word for their SAP ERP textbooks. We are also grateful to the SAP University Alliance Program for providing us SAP software, server hosting and high quality SAP laboratory materials.

REFERENCES [1] H. Topi, J. Valacich, S. Wright, and T. Ryan, IS 2010 Curriculum

Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for Information Systems (AIS). Retrieved from the web site. [Online]. Available: http://www.acm.org/education/curricula/IS%202010%20ACM%20final.pdf

[2] S. Magal and J. Word, Integrated Processes with ERP Systems, Wiley, 2011.

[3] R. Hayen, SAP R/3 Enterprise Software: an Introduction, McGraw-Hill, 2007.

[4] ERPsim 2012 Web Site. [Online]. Available: http://erpsim.hec.ca/ [5] S. Guha, W. J. Kettinger, and T. C. Teng, “Business process

reengineering: building a comprehensive methodology,” Information Systems Management, Summer, 1993.

[6] D. Monk and B. Wagner, “Concepts in enterprise resource planning,” 4th Edition, Course Technology, 2013.

Dr. Ming Wang is a professor of Information Systems, California State University, Los Angeles. She is SAP faculty Coordinator, At Cal State LA. She received her Ph. D. from Southern Illinois University in 1993 and taught previously in the Department of Computer Science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

ProjectPreparation

Business Blueprint

RealizationFinal

Preparation Go Live &Support

ProjectPreparation

Business Blueprint

RealizationFinal

Preparation Go Live &Support

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