Business process supporting IT systems are the basis of every company and decide about success and failure. The Business Informatics Laboratory supports their research and teaching in the study programmes Business Informatics (WIN), Business Informatics plus (WINp) and Applied Informatics (AI).

The Business Informatics Laboratory provides a heterogeneous system landscape with products from a wide range of manufacturers, which enables a complete mapping of business processes (web shop, CRM system, data integration platform, ERP system, Business Process Management System (BPM), Business Intelligence System (BI), Production Planning System (PPS), warehouse management system,...).

The aim is to enable students as future business IT specialists to design and implement tailor-made solutions for business processes. Important here is the independent selection, configuration and expansion of suitable system components and the latest technologies. With the help of the heterogeneous system landscape, basic concepts of business information systems and BI systems can be clarified. Students can design, implement and simulate complex business processes they have learned during the excursions. At the same time, they get to know a wide variety of systems/products and also develop their own components. Another major issue is the efficient and secure processing of data, taking into account legal requirements.

For validation and evaluation of the own solutions and for realistic mapping, e.g. of production, an own simulation environment is currently being created, which provides physical elements such as production cells with Lego robots in addition to a virtual representation.

In summary, the Business Informatics Laboratory focuses on the following topics:

• Process / system analysis and optimization
• Process-/ system design
• Process-/system-/data integration
• Process-/ system implementation
• Business Intelligence
• Business-Simulation
• IT-Servicemanagement (ITIL)

Since some exercises have workshop character and are partly worked as in the later professional everyday life in the team, the laboratory has on the one hand 12 fixed PC workstations, on the other hand other 12 variable workstations with LAN and power supply for group exercises.

1 supervisor PC connected to all student PCs via VNC.

1 printer and beamer

used Software: BizAGI (BPM 2.0), Talend 5.2, MySQL Workbench, Oxid eShop4, Salesforce Developer, OTRS, VMWare Workstation 9, Eclipse Juno, Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft Office, Palo Suite, …

core Software: ESX vSPHERE 4 Server (16GB RAM, 500GB memory in RAID 5 realized) on these different VMs are used by the students in the laboratory (e.g. as central database in ERP systems, webshop and CRM, mirrored OTRS ticket systems or for various projects).

In addition, the laboratory computers are connected to the central OpenSLX system of the university, so that a high degree of flexibility can be achieved in the content of the internships and, if there is a lack of space, internships of other teaching modules can take place here.

The following internships take place in the laboratory: 

• IT- Service Management
• Operating Information Systems
• Bussiness Intelligence
• Enterprise Applications I & II

The laboratory is available to the students outside of events for free work, in particular for post-doctoral work, project work and final theses.