ERP: Packaging Applications

Corporate experience in building

Information Sys-tems is usually characterized by delays, cost over-runs, and user

dissatisfaction. Building an operational system requires time, money, and above all

experience. Many organizational systems that are built in-house are done so by analysts

and programmers on their first assignments! As a result quality suffers and user

dissatisfaction creeps in. One way out is to outsource development of your applications to

reputed vendors. While that can ensure quality, it will certainly push up the budget.

Besides, it might result in development actually slowing down. The outside vendor must

first understand how your organization works before he can take on the development of your

application.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

solutions attempt to address these issues through the use of packaged applications. Most

corporate application requirements like billing, inventory, sales order-processing, and

customer care have a large generic component, as well as a small though critical component

unique to the company's environment. ERP vendors understand this and offer packaged

applications built to handle the generic nature of your application. In addition, they

bundle design and development tools to help customize the solution to your needs. SAP, for

instance, sells the ABAP Workbench, a repository-driven development platform for

client/server applications. The ABAP Workbench is not unlike (at least in concept) other

client server development packages in the market.

Additionally, ERP vendors also bundle CASE

tools for use by application architects and testing tools for the use of Quality Assurance

staff. They provide well-developed methodologies to help implement solutions in a

reasonable time.

With an ERP solution you can be assured of

quality and quick development time. However, you get this at a price, a huge price

actually. But that may change shortly. ERP vendors, who hitherto catered only to the

top-end of the market, are now targeting the large-sized enterprises also. As a result

they have cut prices, improved implementation, and moved to lower-end server platforms

like NT.

Most ERP products come with some sort of

web enablement that lets you deploy the application to the Internet or, more commonly, to

an intranet. Clients or users can then access the enterprise data using a web browser

rather than a specialized client application. Dynamic and interactive access to the

enterprise data can be enabled through the use of Java or ActiveX. If web-based access is

important to your organization you need to get all the facts on the web enablement

features offered by the vendor you are talking to.

The architecture and methodologies used by

ERP products tends to be proprietary in nature and this maybe a cause of concern to some

organizations in these days of open technologies. However, what needs to be understood is

that products such as SAP are largely based on conventional technologies such as N-tier

client server. They usually have thin clients, fat business-rules and transaction server

middle layer, and specialized data access layer consisting of data-access components and

SQL servers. They provide you with a choice of back-end database such as Oracle or Sybase.

It's the integration of these conventional technologies that is pretty much proprietary as

is the Development Workbench. This is largely inevitable considering that there can be no

architectural or integration standards.

Packaged applications today represent the

most matured use of code reuse and component technology. For organizations confronted with

Y2K/reengineering issues packaged applications provide an attractive alternative to merely

re-writing the errant COBOL code or reengineering. For an added cost, organizations can

leave their woes behind for good by porting their data to ERP packages. This is possible

because, ERP is no more the hugely expensive alternative that it used to be a few years

back.