InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 5, 1999
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More Than An Application
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"The packaged application gives you a starting point," says Larry Ferrere, VP of marketing at Vastera Inc., an ERP vendor that built its application on Forté's object-oriented development environment. Companies can use Forté tools and build Forté objects on top of the packaged application. "There's no need to reinvent the wheel," he says. "Users can focus on coding objects specific to their business processes."
Scott Lundstrom, VP of research at AMR Research, disagrees. "While ERP as a development platform may make for a good sales pitch," he says, "if you're serious about application development, it's not even remotely feasible to turn one of these packages into a development platform." The lone possible exception among the major ERP vendors, he says, may be Oracle, which has a sophisticated development tools business in addition to a packaged application business.
The problem is the lack of a full set of application development tools in ERP packages. Major ERP vendors may publish APIs, include a low-level programming language, reveal their underlying data schema, and even provide some customization tools. But they don't usually provide testing and debugging--or much of the other functionality developers expect.
But the lack of programming tools isn't discouraging companies from trying to extend the functionality of their ERP systems with custom code. Murdock Madaus Schwabe in Springville, Utah, maker of Nature's Way dietary supplements, extended R/3 by integrating it with a proprietary warehouse-management system.
Rather than writing R/3 code in ABAP (SAP's native programming language) or fussing with BAPIs, the company turned to Oberon Software Inc., which provides the communications middleware and application connectors that let MMS establish bidirectional communication between 37 different warehouse-management system files.
"We could have written ABAP code, but the cost of ABAP programming and maintenance is enormous," says Bill Waters, MMS's director of information services. With Oberon, MMS saved the initial programming effort and will save even more whenever it upgrades its packaged apps. Oberon provides prebuilt connectors between the two systems and is committed to maintaining and enhancing these links so MMS doesn't have to.MMS also used SAP's IDOCs to integrate its EDI system. "The IDOCs gave us a predefined way to pull out SAP files. Otherwise, it's hard to find data in SAP," Waters says.
This clearly isn't application development as IT has known it. A company generally doesn't build an application in Baan, SAP, or Oracle Financials the way it builds an application in Cobol, Visual Basic, or PowerBuilder. Rather, this kind of development is synonymous with enterprise application integration, which has emerged as one of IT's top priorities this year.
The ERP suite as development platform is part of an even larger change in IT application development. Within the IT group, the very definition of application development is changing. "The IT group now does development under the banner of integration," says David Taber, senior VP of Forté's Java business unit.
As a sign of how far the build-vs.-buy pendulum has swung, IT groups often can't get funds for big development projects, Taber says. But there seems to be plenty of money for enterprise-integration as companies scramble to leverage their ERP investments wherever and however they can, he adds.
The interest in ERP packages as development platforms also reflects the inherent shortcomings of even the best ERP suites. Despite ERP vendors' efforts to expand their products' functionality, "ERP packages still don't do everything an IT department needs," says Hurwitz Group's Bonadio.
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Illustration by Matt Foster
Photo of Waters by Dirk Douglass
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