An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system maintains a plurality of business elements. Each of the business elements represents a business function that may or may not be needed depending on a customer's business requirement. A scoping process is a process which determines what business elements are required according to the customer's business requirement and the relationships exist among some of the business elements. The ERP system provides an automatic business configuration subsystem. The automatic business configuration subsystem maintains a set of rules. Each of the rules representing a relationship between two business elements maintained at the ERP system. The automatic business configuration subsystem automatically determines which business elements are required and need to be implemented based on the set of rules. The automatic business configuration subsystem may also automatically determine whether statuses of the business elements are consistent with each other in view of the rules.