No abstract

Abstract. The paper discusses the reasons of complexity rise in ERP system SAP R/3. It proposes a method for measuring complexity of SAP. Based on this method, the computer program in ABAP for measuring complexity of particular SAP implementation is proposed as a tool for keeping ERP complexity under control. The main principle of the measurement method is counting the number of items or relations in the system. The proposed computer program is based on counting of records in organization tables in SAP. Keywords: Complexity, ERP, SAP, measurement, information system, business. IntroductionIn this paper we discuss the approaches to complexity and show that several methodologies used for Information and communication technology (ICT) and information systems (IS) management do not handle the topic of complexity well. Then we discuss the complexity of SAP ERP 1 system and the reasons for rising complexity in SAP implementations. Afterwards we propose a method and a program for measuring complexity of ERP systems and describe a verification of the method on a certain business case. There are several decisions during the lifecycle of an SAP System that influence the complexity of the systems. These decisions are made by project manager, by IT managers or by team members. The goal of our paper is to give a tool for the decision makers, which can measure the complexity at a certain point. It could be used by project manager or solution architect during the implementation to control the complexity and prevent the growth of it. Related Work on Measuring ComplexityA good theoretical basis for describing and exploring complexity can be found in the mathematical graph theory [1], [2], which can be applied to some IS/ICT models to facilitate their quantification and subsequent comparison and, in some cases, even their simplification. Publications that come closest to the topic of business information system complexity deal with using metrics to measure complexity, such as information flow metrics [3], Halstead's method or functional point analysis [4], or a simple number of source code lines [5]. These methods are focused on software development and are less suitable to handle SAP systems, where more settings are done by customization and system configuration. There are also publications dealing with the impacts of complexity on system security and maintainability. Their objective is to 1 SAP ERP -Enterprise Resource Planning software of SAP company (www.sap.com)