Lessons learnt from five years of experience in ERP requirements engineering

Generic off-the-shelf requirements engineering (RE) processes have been packaged by enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors since 1997, and adopted by client organizations as the key strategy for getting the business requirements and the conceptual design for their complex solutions. We summarize one company's five years of experience in making a generic ERP RE model a live process. It rests on previously published ERP RE process assessment results and reports on what we learnt with particular focus on typical issues organizations face when adopting a standard model and solutions that can be used to avoid those issues in the future. Each of our lessons is described together with a RE practice, technical foundation for the practice and engineering techniques for the RE practitioner. The lessons were used to refine our corporate documentation model, a process-focused and template-based ERP-architecture framework.