Designing business processes is difficult, time consuming, and very expensive. Highly trained experts conduct seemingly countless interviews with users and domain experts to determine business requirements. Then, even more experts join those people, and the team invests thousands of hours in designing, developing, and implementing effective business processes that meet those requirements. All of this amounts to a very high-risk activity that is prone to failure. And it must be done before information systems development can even begin.

ERP vendors, such as SAP, have invested millions of labour hours into the business blueprints that underlie their ERP solutions. These blueprints consist of hundreds or thousands of different business processes. Examples include processes for hiring employees, acquiring fixed assets, acquiring consumable goods, and developing custom one-off (a unique product with a unique design) manufacturing, to name just a few. Additionally, since ERP vendors implement their business processes in hundreds of organizations, they are forced to customize their standard blueprint for use in particular industries.

For example, SAP has a distribution business blueprint that is customized for the auto parts industry, the electronics industry, and the aircraft industry. Hundreds of other customized solutions exist as well. Even better, the ERP vendors have developed software solutions that fit their business process blueprints. In theory, no software development is