Semantic-based toolkit for automated building block composition in SAP R/3

Abstract

SAP R/3 provides a huge number of parametric customizations in order to adapt the system to each particular organization context, and usually consultants, or consulting firms are hired to provide the needed expertise in such reengineering process. Such process is known as Customizing by SAP AG (2003) and J.A. Hernandez (2000). SAP Best Practices by J.A. Hernandez (2000) and R/3 Simplification Group (2003) aims at reusing results obtained using the customized implementations. Central to the best practices approach is the Building Block (BB) concept by R/3 Simplification Group (2003). The basic idea is the modularization of a vertical solution identifying and extracting all its client independent information. BB contents in SAP Best Practices are defined considering from the start the possibility of their reuse from an implementation point of view. Basically, the BB content is defined by the identification of which business process (BP) parts can be reused within a predefined solution. Due to the rapid growth of the BBs number, choosing the correct BB in order to satisfy part of a specific business process, is expensive in terms of time, as the selection is driven only by the developer experience. We present here a toolkit, which allows to model - using semantic annotation - BB descriptions and BPs, and, more important, performs automated selection and composition of BPs. Our framework adopts a subset of OWL-DL as ontology language and description logics (DLs) by F. Baader et al. (2002) as formal framework. Going beyond standard inferences usually provided by DLs, we use in our approach recently defined non standard inferences