Lessons Learned from Experimental Prototype Development for KPI Acquisition and Modeling from Legacy ERP Systems

In this paper we consider a business case of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system vendor who needs to introduce qualitative features without making great investments in the legacy source code. We propose to extend legacy ERP system’s functionality by applying the Leading System paradigm so that business process management can be introduced. This enables business process awareness and provides opportunity for qualitative feature set introduction in a legacy ERP system. As a result, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) acquisition, modeling and analysis from the process aware legacy ERP system becomes possible. The main focus in this paper is on lessons learned about a suitable prototype architecture for KPI acquisition, modeling and analysis, and about best practices for KPI analysis from log data of business process execution.