Requirements Engineering Of ERP In Telecom Industry

The major telecommunications operators in China are trying to build ERP system in order to get better positions in the growing competitive market. ERP system enables the operators to reinforce the management of finance, human resources, projects and assets, and enhances operators' core competitiveness. So far, there are already practical experiences of ERP and a lot of success stories in manufacturing, commerce, and other traditional industries, but there are not satisfactory system solutions in a special service industry like telecommunications. When the operators implement ERP system, they generally used COTS of the ERP vendors. Only after the COTS were configured, customized and expensed, and the companies' own business processes were adjusted appropriately, the companies and the ERP systems would adapt to each others. Whether ERP system can be implemented successfully and whether it will achieve the desired goals depend on the requirements engineering in ERP project.In the paper, firstly, we summarized the implementation of ERP in every industry, and analyzed the telecommunications industry's own characteristics, the special requirements of ERP systems and the common problems in the implementation. Then with the traditional software requirements engineering and the requirements characteristic of telecom industry, we proposed the TREP (Telecom-industry-oriented-ERP Requirements Engineering Process). The life cycle model of TREP is the core of this paper. TREP life cycle model is a two-dimensional structural model. In the horizon, five stages are organized in accordance with the time. They are Selection, Mapping, Definition, Creation and Specification, and each of them ends at a milestone. The main goals of five stages and five milestone criteria are all given in the paper. In the vertical, organized in the contents, roles, activities, products and work flows are involved. Between them, five core workflows is the emphasis of this paper. They are requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, requirements specification, requirements validation and requirements management. Finally, we introduced the application of TREP in the project of China Netcom Group ERP in the base Oracle ERP software packages, and lessons learned.