Enhancing Enterprise Resource Planning users’ understanding through ontology-based training

An ERP system is a set of highly integrated and parametric applications, designed to fit to a variety of business. Because of this inherent complexity its implementation can be very demanding and the users involved must undertake extensive training, using sophisticated training materials. Existing training materials present major weaknesses, that the current paper aims to overcome, such as (1) semantic inconsistencies, (2) lack of explicit definition of constructs and (3) lack of knowledge reusability.This paper proposes a prototype model for the design and development of ERP training material, where both the multimedia objects used in training scenarios and the knowledge built into them are captured and fully reusable. The proposed approach helps trainees understand: (i) which are the building blocks of an ERP application, (ii) how they relate with each other and (iii) how they can be used in order to solve business specific problems.