Article summary – Web ERP
Because of the preparation of the Y2K phenomenon, the development of ERP application slows down in 1999. After the Y2K complaint ERP application vendors realized it is time to use the latest technology to facilitate their ERP system. As the explosive usage of Internet, vendors of ERP system are planning to use Internet based technology like XML in developing the next generation of ERP application. Initially, ERP application was evolved from financial based packages. The current application contains the following functionalities: financial, human resources, sales and distribution, manufacture, material procurement and production.
Unfortunately, ERP packages are internally focused that is not related to the shop floor, on the other hand an application called MES (manufacturing execution system) which is worked on the shop floor. The vendors are facing one challenge, how to align ERP applications and MES applications and be able to work together. Usually the ERP and MES applications are developed by third party, the integration and control become even harder.
At present, major ERP software vendor are offering e-commerce versions applications. ERP application profit increased from 16.9 billion in 1999 to 21.4 billion in 2004. One of the advantages of ERP is the application provide easier integration within business. But the disadvantage is still too internal focused and lack the functionality to deal with extended processes.
Some of the ERP application vendor started to reconstruct the software and PeopleSoft introduced the “best-in-class e-business” ERP software which offering XML browser-based access and open integration across enterprise boundaries (cited in P46), because the advantage of XML is they allow different applications to communicate with each other, and it greatly decrease the cost.
The new generation ERP software is described in 4 categories:
Flow production system – manufacture is using the material on the shop floor, at the same time an electronic signal is sent to the supplier for the usage. In other words, the manufacture material is charged by usage.
Trading exchanges – An ASP (application service provider) portal brings the prototype software’s and services to the engineering market.
Modular architectures – The modular ERP application that allows the user to install the application in phases. In other words, the user can select the desire components from the ERP application to install instead of installing the whole system and left five modular unused.
E-business collaboration shifted – this application helps organization to integrate and collaborate its multi-sites are derived from a single infrastructure. All information and data can be created in HTML format and it can be accessed by any browser. One of the well known applications is called eMatrix; its advantage is it allows the manufactures to design the ERP application best meet their needs. Furthermore, the eMatrix system is flexible to be an advantage as the manufacture to integrate with MES environment.
Here comes the research question.
1. How do organisation manage to transform the traditional resources to the new web ERP application?
2. Some organisations are using older version of applications and browsers, web ERP application may require the use of XML which is not recognised by older applications and browsers, my question is, Is it too fast for organisations to use Web ERP in this stage?
3. ERP development was just recover from the down turned, do organisations consider it is worth to invest a large amount of money for the Web ERP application?