About the Conference

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an industry term commonly used to describe a business management system that integrates activities across functional departments including planning, manufacturing, purchasing of parts, controlling and maintaining inventory, tracking orders, etc. Typically, developing and maintaining ERP systems is labor-intensive. Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Values (ROV) for developing ERP systems largely depend on the capability of evolving, maintaining, and customizing/configuring the ERP system to respond to new business needs and emerging market segments. Evolutionability, maintainability, and configurability are thus at the heart of the ERP business. Software Product Line (SPL) fits naturally into the ERP business. For example, ERP systems can benefit greatly from the concepts of commonalities and variabilities to enhance evolutionability and maintainability. Moreover, product-line concepts can substantially reduce current complex and tedious configuration procedures that are not only resource-intensive, but also error-prone. The central theme of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in SPL and ERP industry to report on their experience and investigate current and future practical challenges in order to adopt product line architectures (PLAs) for developing ERP systems. Specific objectives of this workshop are as follows: 1) Collate current practices and experience in developing ERP systems using PLAs 2) Explore and discuss how the ERP industry can benefit from the PLA 3) Discuss and document challenges and barriers for adopting PLAs in the ERP industry 4) Investigate various innovative techniques for modeling, developing, and implementing ERP systems using PLAs 5) Initiate a Working Group that focuses on using PLAs for the ERP domain to further develop this area and its practice A broader objective of this workshop is to investigate and to document practical experiences in adopting PLAs in different domains. We believe that, sharing the challenges and barriers in introducing PLAs to a concrete domain can be useful for practitioners across various domains.

Conference Dates