Rea Model-based Enterprise Information Systems Research

Under the conditions of the information age, enterprises are facing with a complicated, dynamic and competitive environment, which exacerbates the difficulty and risk of their decision-making. Utilizing an efficient information system to handle the huge amount of dynamic information becomes the key to survive. Database, computer networks and other information technologies provide the basic conditions to build enterprise information systems. Besides, there's an important thing we must deal with before utilizing these technologies. That is how to understand and describe the economic activities of nowadays companies with a logic model.This thesis focuses on introducing the REA (Resource-Event-Agent) model and its application in MIS developing. It began with discussing the feature of complexity and variety of enterprises'activities in the information age, and then compared three modeling methodologies, which are events approach, entity-relationship model approach and REA, and concluded the relationship among them. After a full introduction of the content of REA, business process models and data storing structures of a typical online bookstore company were built by using the REA model concept, which demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of REA approach. The last part of the thesis is a comparison between the REA model and a popular accounting MIS software in China's market, again, we figured out the advantages of REA by comparison and discussed how to improve MIS software design by utilizing the idea of REA model.