Extend ERP

ERP Surround

In this age of global enterprises, there is a constant endeavor to create a unified business platform to enable enterprise wide data, business and process visibility. Enterprises who roll out ERP in their organizations realize that ERP provides only 80 - 90% support for business process automation and cannot work all by itself. There is a need to extend and integrate ERP to other enterprise applications. Leveraging SOA and integration in an ERP roll out in a best of breed approach enables Real Time Integration, Event Driven Integration and defining a Single Version of the Truth for the enterprise.

As we all know companies implement monolithic ERP tools comprising of many distinct components, there is a need to integrate these components internally and also to the external business applications, legacy applications and business units. This is made possible by middleware tools like TIBCO etc. and thus the role of SOA and integration becomes crucial in such large ERP implementations in enterprises.

We showcase in our group how SOA can be implemented as an enterprise-wide mission-critical tool for large ERP integration to legacy applications. The focus is mainly on Integration (Package Applications), Common Data Representation and enabling a single IT infrastructure across all the divisions of an enterprise, its lines of businesses and geographies.

Extend Enterprise with SOA & Integration

Now it is important to realize that apart from an ERP application there are many more applications that exist in an organization that need to be integrated across the enterprise to create a unified view of business. An ERP application should not be looked at from inside-out view, but it should be looked at as a part of an enterprise process that has many applications and the aim is to use integration where ERP works with these other applications in a process centric view. This is what is meant by a Single Version of Truth in IT and geography is irrelevant in such a scenario.

Leveraging SOA can help transform the IT infrastructure from monolithic rigid architectures to a flexible and agile platform. So it is imperative for organizations to go one more step further and look at a process centric view instead of an application centric view (like SOA for ERP) and use SOA and integration to truly realize One IT in their business universe.

Click here for: Whitepaper on ERP and Integration - Coming Soon…