Using COSMIC-FFP for sizing, estimating and planning in an ERP environment

Triggered by new European legislation the Dutch Office for Regulations decided to renew major parts of their IT landscape with Oracle’s E-Business Suite. They expect that this packaged solution offers the possibility of quick implementation of new business processes. For the implementation of new regulations and the redesign of existing ones, a software factory was set up with three production lines implementing processchains. Because of the nature of the documentation COSMIC-FFP was used to size the process-chains to be implemented. The measured functional size was used to support the cost estimation and the planning process. This experience shows that COSMIC-FFP can be used to size, estimate and plan an ERP implementation with a high degree of parameterisation. Since this kind of implementation differs in a number of ways from an average implementation of packaged software future research is necessary.