Detecting Gaps between ERP Software and Organizational Needs: A Semantic Similarity Based Approach

Gap analysis is one of the most important phases in implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In this paper, an approach is proposed to automatically detect gaps between software capacities and organizational needs based on semantic similarity computation. The approach takes two business process models as input, and one specifies software capacities and the other describes organizational needs. The output of it is a report of gaps. As a matter of fact, the differences between application domain and software discipline make semantic heterogeneity a key problem in gap detection, therefore the technologies of semantic similarity computing are employed to resolve ambiguity issues caused by the use of synonyms or homonyms. In particular, the idea of similarity propagation is introduced to pick out a mapping between corresponding activities and data, and Hungarian algorithm is employed to reduce its time complexity. Then the similarity of whole models is measured according to the minimal total cost of change operations. Finally, an experiment is given to evaluate the method.