Solution templates tool for enterprise business applications integration

Abstract

Today's enterprises must meet the rapidly changing market demands while collaborating with much broader range of trading partners to maximize supply chain efficiency and improve services to customers and their profit margin. To accomplish these business goals, their business application systems, such as enterprise ERP, must integrate and adapt rapidly to meet these business demands and collaborate with other business system without major reimplementation effort. Our proposed approach addresses these problems by using model based approach of creating reusable solution template that consists of off-the-shelf artifacts to be quickly assembled as a solution. In this paper, we introduce a Solution Template Tool that simplifies the life cycle for creating an integration solution, through the flexible design and customization of solution templates, and an interactive environment driven by wizards. By providing levels of abstraction, the proposed tool allows users to compose templates of platform independent model without worrying about implementation details. The tool transforms the composed templates into platform specific IT execution model and a deployable solution, thus easing the task of solution integration lifecycle. A solution template of UCCnet illustrates our study. © 2008 IEEE.