Abstract
In manufacturing, substantial efficiency gains have been achieved through industrialization. Key concepts of industrialization include standardization, automation, and modularization. Transferring these to IT service production promises increased efficiency. ERP systems apply such concepts and have been an integrating tool for making production for manufacturers more efficient. However, previous research has considered ERP systems for IT service providers either very broadly or only from a business or technical perspective. This article investigates how to apply the ERP system concept comprehensively to a specific type of IT service provider. To this end, application services are prescribed as being composed of three types of configuration models. This helps to achieve a composition of (IT) application services that is comparable to physical parts, and it further supports their management and automated production within an ERP system. An information system architecture with the ERP system at its core is presented. It supports application service production. All relevant service lifecycle phases are considered and a consistent domain model is provided that connects business and technical layer entities. Targeted companies can improve their application service production in terms of quality and efficiency by leveraging this novel automation- and model-based approach.
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Notes
The EU SME definition is used for company size categorization (European Commission 2011). A company is categorized as large if it exceeds the definition’s limits.
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Hintsch, J., Kramer, F. & Turowski, K. An information system architecture for build- and engineer-to-order production of application services. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 16, 649–682 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-018-0369-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-018-0369-z