An approach to simulate enterprise resource planning systems

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are an essential part of the infrastructure to run and support a company's business processes. These systems have to be updated frequently to satisfy law regulations, needed functionality and sustain stability within a changing technical environment. Having these needs for change in mind the impact of related updates is often not transparent to the operator and may cause unwanted side-effects. The way to prevent update problems is running a shadow system and deploy changes there first. However this is not always feasible due to monetary or other reasons. One proper approach might be the simulation of ERP systems. Therefore this workshop paper shows a process how a simulation model for complex ERP systems might be developed. The paper focuses on the development of an adequate structure to represent complex ERP system architectures. For the development of this structure it utilizes the idea of the Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm and an extended 3 tier architecture reference model. The basic approach focuses on a so called multi-layer service map, which contains all services inside an ERP system and interdependencies between these services. This multi-layer service map can be used as data basis to create a simulation model of the analysed ERP system later on.