Configuring processes and business documents - an integrated approach to enterprise systems collaboration

Enterprise Systems (ES) provide standardized, off-the-shelf support for operations and management within or-ganizations. With the advent of ES based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and an increasing demand of IT-supported interorganizational collaboration, implemen-tation projects face paradigmatically new challenges. The configuration of ES is costly and error-prone. Dependen-cies between business processes and business documents are hardly explicit and foster component proliferation in-stead of reuse. Configurative modeling can support the problem in two ways: First, conceptual modeling abstracts from technical details and provides more intuitive access and overview. Second, configuration allows the projection of variants from master models providing manageable vari-ants with controlled flexibility. We aim at tackling the prob-lem by proposing an integrated model-based framework for configuring both, processes and business documents, on an equal basis; as together, they constitute the core business components of an ES