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April 5, 1999

ERP:
More Than An Application

Organizations are turning their enterprise resource planning packages into platforms for application development and integration

By Alan Radding

hen a company sinks millions of dollars into a core business application and reengineers its business processes around it, the system is destined to become more than an application. Enterprise resource planning suites have become platforms for application development and integration.

The deployment of new business logic on an ERP platform gives a company greater flexibility and increasing efficiencies. But custom development and enterprise application integration in the ERP environment isn't a simple task.

The leading ERP packages have many shortcomings when it comes to extending their functionality by incorporating custom code. A number of software vendors make tools ranging from high-end development environments to specialized integration technologies to extend ERP functionality.

The major ERP vendors clearly want to be a key element in their customers' business and computing infrastructures, says Steve Bonadio, a senior analyst with the Hurwitz Group. The idea is to place the ERP applications at the heart of the company's systems and to connect legacy applications, other critical business systems, and custom applications. In this scenario, the ERP system becomes a business-services framework, a central information repository, and a data-distribution facility.

That's exactly what Swiss telecommunications carrier Swisscom HE is doing. Swisscom, in Bern, faced having to build as many as 70 different interfaces to bring financial information flows into its SAP R/3 suite from other systems. Swisscom had also restructured its business processes around the R/3 suite, which impacted other applications. "Our customer-service application, for example, needs to know details from the trouble-ticket system, which is separate from R/3," says Reto Von Arb, Swisscom's head of R/3 integration.

Swisscom had committed itself to an object and component architecture several years earlier, and it had an extensive enterprise Corba environment. However, its Corba objects couldn't work directly with SAP's non-Corba object model, which consisted of business objects and an object repository. Instead, the effort required bridge technology from Visual Edge, which let the company combine SAP's object model with its own Corba infrastructure.

ERP Application Development Options
Companies can develop or buy add-ons to their enterprise resource planning systems

Data access middleware: Lets developers easily find and extract SQL data from SAP R/3 or other ERP solutions; lets them custom-format reports

Messaging middleware: Lets programmers write applications that asynchronously exchange messages with ERP packages; programmers still need to write or buy a module to handle message when it arrives

Object middleware: Lets developers create applications consisting of objects based on standard object models that interact with the ERP solution; will usually involve an object bridge

Packaged ERP integration applications: Third-party tools enable integration at a high level by combining messaging and custom, application-specific adapters accessed through an easy-to-use, coding-free front-end app

Vendor-supplied tools: Utilities that let users extend and customize the ERP application, usually in a release-independent fashion, using technologies such as APIs or programming languages; require some programming and ERP application expertise

Data: InformationWeek

Despite the difficulties Swisscom encountered, ERP packages make sense as application development platforms because they function as giant collectors and dispensers of information from core business processes, which don't stop at the boundaries of the ERP system but continue into areas supported by other applications.

Similarly, even peripheral applications may benefit from tapping data collected in the ERP app.

Development Hooks
ERP vendors of all sizes are rushing to add application development hooks to their tools. SAP, for example, has published more than 1,000 business APIs (BAPIs) for R/3. The vendor offers interchange documents (IDOCs), standard file formats for common information exchanges. SAP offers connectors embedded in tools such as Microsoft's Visual Studio and IBM's Visual Age, which make it easier to connect, say, a Visual Basic application with R/3.

Other vendors have built their ERP apps on fourth-generation language tools, such as Progress Software or Forté Software. A company can standardize, for example, on QAD Inc.'s MFG Pro, an ERP suite for midsize manufacturing companies, and have the full Progress development and database environment at its disposal.