1. ¹European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
2. ²Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
3. ³Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
4. ⁴SAP Research, SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany
5. ⁵SAP Research, SAP Australia Pty Ltd, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Correspondence: Alexander Dreiling, European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Münster, Leonardo-Campus 3, 48149 Münster, Germany. Tel: +49 251 8338070; E-mail: alexander.dreiling@sap.com

Received 5 April 2006; Revised 26 May 2006; Accepted 26 September 2006.

Abstract

The common presupposition of enterprise systems (ES) is that they lead to significant efficiency gains. However, this is only the case for well-implemented ES that are well-aligned with the organisation. The list of ES implementation failures is significant which is partly attributable to the insufficiently addressed fundamental problem of adapting an ES efficiently. As long as it is not intuitively possible to configure an ES, this problem will prevail because organisations have a non-generic character. A solution to this problem consists in re-thinking current practices of ES provision. This paper proposes a new approach based on configurable process models, which reflect ES functionalities. We provide in this paper a taxonomy of situations that can occur from a business perspective during process model configuration. This taxonomy is represented via so-called semantic configuration patterns. In the next step, we discuss so-called syntactic configuration patterns. This second type of configuration patterns implements the semantic configuration patterns for specific modelling techniques. We chose two popular process modelling languages in order to illustrate our approach.