InformationWeek

April 5, 1999

ERP:
More Than An Application

continued...page 4 of 4

Miller SQA makes demand information and material requirements available to its suppliers via the Web, and has trimmed an entire day off its manufacturing process. For a company that stresses simple, quick, affordable products--the SQA in its name--this is a critical achievement. The system also helped Miller SQA cut its average lead time to five days, from six weeks.

Not Quite There
As development platforms, the major ERP suites don't function as well as the more focused business packages. The difficulty stems from the complexity of ERP products and a reluctance by the leading vendors to open up their systems. It's one thing to extend the vendor's architecture, says AMR's Lundstrom. But a full-blown development platform is quite different.

Still, the major ERP vendors are adding development hooks. For instance, PeopleSoft provides People Tools, for customization and integration, while Baan is trying to convert to a business-object interface that developers could write to when creating code, notes Bonadio. Even if Baan objects aren't based on a standard model, third parties will likely offer bridges from Baan objects to Corba, Enterprise JavaBeans and COM objects. Visual Edge is readying a bridge to PeopleSoft and will follow with one to Baan when there is demand. Oracle has already licensed Visual Edge's object bridge technology.

SAP introduced the SAP business object model in 1996. But that model, like much of the rest of SAP, is a proprietary design. It doesn't recognize Corba, COM, or EJB, and requires object bridging or adapters that will map objects and methods from one object model to another.

Bridges, however, aren't trivial to build and maintain. To build an adapter or bridge, developers must crack the SAP repository and understand the complex SAP metadata, as well as the function and its methods and all the things SAP does with its own object calls.

This was more than Swisscom wanted to do. It turned to Visual Edge for the SAP-to-Corba bridge. The bridge works pretty well when the system is dealing with well-defined objects for each part of the transaction or event. "If we have a business object, a method and a corresponding object in R/3, everything works fine," Von Arb says.

Things got tricky when Swisscom moved beyond well-defined objects, for example, to its legacy apps. And, despite standardizing on Corba, the company wasn't a pure Corba operation. An early adopter of object and component technology, Swisscom used some customized Corba object request brokers, which could better address its needs for security and transaction integrity. The result is a non-standard Corba environment.

Business-process workflow that transcended SAP also proved troublesome for Swisscom. SAP offers workflow capabilities, but only within the SAP environment. Swisscom workflow requirements reached beyond SAP. The solution involved creating new objects, writing Corba IDLs, and using SAP's IDOC technology. "We had to extend the IDOC by creating our own structures. Basically, we were building our own BAPI," Von Arb says. This works, but the results aren't release independent, he adds. When the company upgrades the application, such customizations may need rewriting.

SAP works as a development platform for Swisscom because the carrier had already converted an object environment. By using a bridge, it can build applications that tightly integrate with R/3, calling into or being called by the ERP package. Organizations that want to build apps on top of their ERP applications but aren't quite so far along in the conversion to objects and a standard object model--the majority of organizations--will have to settle for looser integration with the ERP package. Or they can adopt one of the smaller ERP packages that deliver a ready-to-use development environment.

It will be a long time, if ever, before the major ERP packages provide a complete application development environment. For now, the best that users can expect are tools to facilitate integration and customization.