A software metric research to evaluate the dimension of standard systems'customization

The issue concerning the evaluation of the customizing dimension was only recently born with the progressive increase of the ERP systems customizing costs. After having chosen the ERP system, manu enterprises found it rather difficult to conform to the standard procedures during the implementing phase; as a consequence, there was the request of new and ad-hoc procedures to be added to the standard ones supplied by the ERP system. So, the customizing effort inreased exponentially. The Function Point Analysis is a standard dimensional software metric having an international spread and it is applied by a large number of enterprises in the world. Its use is well known for "ad hoc" software projects but it is a novelty when applied in the acqiring and maintenance phase of "Commercial-Off-The-Shelf" (COTS) software (whose category includes the ERP systems). our resarch describes thae main cost items of ERP systems, the FPA actual use applied to ERP environment and a simple equation model for the effort estimate: this model is just a first step towards the control of the ERP system customizing effort, that will be even more accurate when a geater quantity of empirical data are collected.