Model-Driven Customizing of ERP Systems: A Case Study

Customizing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can require implementing new modules adding support for processes not considered by the ERP vendor. Since customizing can account for a large portion of the budget in ERP introduction projects, in this work, we aim at increasing programming productivity in this area. As case study, we introduce a model-driven approach to developing ERP modules for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) based on our Domain-Specific Language (DSL) modAL. Besides the DSL, we present accompanying development tools allowing to generate runnable modules from modAL specifications. We evaluate our approach based on a usability test conducted among BC developers. The results suggest that our model-driven approach is beneficial.